When you are not used to functional programming you may have seen that there is a function called identity which seems to be useless.

f(x) = x

Why would I use such a function?

In functional programming, functions are first-class citizens, which means that they can be passed as arguments and returned as value.

Once you start to read about it you will face some type of functions called high order functions (HOFs), which are functions that receives functions as arguments. This kind of functions improve its flexibility.

I'll use Javascript as a language to explain:

function sortBy(collection, function) {
  // implementation
}

sortBy([{ name: 'Paul' }, { name: 'John' }], function(o) {
  return o.name;
});
// => [{ name: 'John' }, { name: 'Paul' }]

Ok, sortBy is nice when you have a collection of complex object, where you want to specify the property to sort by. But, simple collections of numbers and strings, we don't need to pass this function.

sortBy([3, 2, 1], identity);
// => [1, 2, 3]

So we could easily rewrite a sort function that delegates to sortBy, to avoid writting it every time.

function sort(collection) {
  return sortBy(collection, identity);
}

sort([3, 2, 1]);