[LukeHoersten]

The benefit of purely functional programming is that side effects can be managed explicitly and checked by the compiler, speeding up code refactors and making them safer. Using high order functions to save a few lines of code is not the big benefit of functional programming and is more a superficial feature more akin to syntax sugar. Same with list comprehensions. This seems to be the case in many hybrid languages that borrow superficial purely functional language features.

[sinkasapa]

It seems like if you want the expressiveness of the simply typed lambda calculus, higher order functions are more than just syntactic sugar.