My previous, somewhat-cranky comment got downvoted away, but I do think Lisp's "higher-order magic" and "ability to do calculus" is being a bit exaggerated here. From below - evaluating an Nth derivative in 80s-era C is not so atrocious:

    #define DX 0.0001
    typedef double (*func)(double);

    double NthDeriv(int n, func f, double x) {
        if (n == 1) {
            return (f(x + DX) - f(x)) / DX;
        }
        else {
            return (NthDeriv(n - 1, f, x + DX) - NthDeriv(n - 1, f, x)) / DX;
        }
    }

    double Cube(double x) { return x * x * x; }

    double result = NthDeriv(3, &Cube, 5.0);

As mentioned in previous discussions of this article, the equivalent in Python is pretty elegant:

    >>> def deriv(f):
    ...   dx = 0.0001
    ...   def fp(x):
    ...     return (f(x + dx) - f(x)) / dx
    ...   return fp
    ...
    >>> cube = lambda x: x**3
    >>> deriv(cube)(2.0)
    12.000600010022566