To me, Perl looks vastly more complicated than Lisp. I believe you'd find that if you'd know Lisp like you do Perl you'd be at least as productive as you're in

To me, Perl looks vastly more complicated than Lisp. I believe you'd find that if you'd know Lisp like you do Perl you'd be at least as productive as you're in Perl. As somebody who loves both Lisp and Perl I'd probably say you'd be as productive (unless you were sitting in a domain that one language or the other was a better fit for). Well - apart from CPAN and the testing infrastructure. And the editor/IDE support is worse unless you're already an emacs person... but those are just coz Clojure is young. I'm thoroughly sick of the Lisp == academic == hard myth. It's just nonsense. I've taught newbie devs Lisp and Perl in the past and both groups seem to take it on at about the same pace.