I would assume that most of the popular high-order functions came from the lisp world; 16 year web devs are using Javascript which took more than a bit of inspiration from the lisps.
That said, to really squeeze the most out of HOFs the language probably needs a well developed type system. I've noticed with untyped code that at some point HOFs start becoming hard to write because the layers of abstraction get confusing in a way that static analysis would be helpful with. Although my lesson there is to not go overboard with HOFs - if I need static analysis to write working code it is probably too clever to understand by reading it! The Haskell community might succeed in proving that view wrong, but until then...
That said, to really squeeze the most out of HOFs the language probably needs a well developed type system. I've noticed with untyped code that at some point HOFs start becoming hard to write because the layers of abstraction get confusing in a way that static analysis would be helpful with. Although my lesson there is to not go overboard with HOFs - if I need static analysis to write working code it is probably too clever to understand by reading it! The Haskell community might succeed in proving that view wrong, but until then...