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Comment by Aaronmacaron | Hacker News Reader

I've been waiting so long for this day. Finally arrow functions in PHP! Until now it was extremely cumbersome to use higher-order functions such as array_map() or usort() . This is especially true if you're a full stack developer who frequently switches between PHP and JavaScript which has had support for arrow functions for a long time. The hitherto existing anonymous functions are so verbose and it's a real pain to bind all closure variables manually.

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It still is cumbersome:

  array_filter(arr, fn)
  array_reduce(arr, fn)
  array_map(fn, arr1[, arr2, ...])
  array_walk(&arr, fn)

Not mentioning additional parameters such as `$flag`, `$userdata` or `$clownshow`.

I think you're the first to point this out. Thank you so much; I just uninstalled php.

Sorry, this wasn't meant for you as a power user, but for the uninitiated who might gets the impression that things are great.

Use eloquent collections instead of vanilla arrays and you'll be much happier

AFAIK, they're just laravel collections - it's (I believe) a separate package you can install which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with laravel eloquent directly. The collections package I'm thinking of might be an unofficial port/extraction of laravel collection stuff. my brother has, I think, started using these in non-laravel projects because he likes the syntax.

I wish they implemented them like in JS without the unnecessary fn().

That would give syntactic ambiguity, since the => operator is also used to separate keys and values in array notation.

Fair, but seems inconsistent to have `fn` instead of `function` like we use for anonymous functions - unless `fn` acts like an alias to `function` now (which doesn't sound like is the case) which wouldn't be as ambiguous for the compiler to figure out

I don't think there's an ambiguity, since the key-value application of that operator only happens inside the array definition or when you do foreach ($x as $k => $v) {}.

There is ambiguity. This was specifically mentioned in the RFC for the feature: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/arrow_functions_v2#syntax

It does if you're trying to make an array of anonymous functions...

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