The higher-order framework is you! Most of the recent work in this field seems to be based around the idea of program "sketching", i.e. the programmer sketches

The higher-order framework is you! Most of the recent work in this field seems to be based around the idea of program "sketching", i.e. the programmer sketches a high-level specification, and the algorithms progressively synthesise and evaluate small functions / programs to efficiently implement the sketch. No doubt machine learning researchers will have something to say about this though...