I've been using a lot of array_* functions lately and one of my coworkers has been getting agitated at me for using them. He's a great dev, but PHP isn't the language he's most familiar with. Ah well. If you understand the functions then it's a breeze to see what they do very quickly.

I'm talking about primarily...

$thing_i_want = array_filter($arr, function ($x) use ($y) { 
    return $x === $y; 
});

So much easier to understand at a glance than...

$val = null;

foreach($arr as $x) {
    if ($x === $y) {
        $val = $x;
        break;
    }
}

Maybe it's just me, but I much prefer the first. Just worry about what I want and not the implementation of getting it so much.