Mark Jason Dominus also says the same thing about Perl in his Higher Order Perl book [1][2] and goes onto show that Perl has 6 of the 7 features that Norvig des

Mark Jason Dominus also says the same thing about Perl in his Higher Order Perl book [1][2] and goes onto show that Perl has 6 of the 7 features that Norvig describes has making Lisp different [3]. [1] http://hop.perl.plover.com http://hop.perl.plover.com [2] Perl is much more like Lisp than it is like C (from Preface) [3] ... the book "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming", by Peter Norvig, includes a section titled "What Makes Lisp Different?" that describes seven features of Lisp. Perl shares six of these features; C shares none of them. These are big, important features, features like first-class functions, dynamic access to the symbol table, and automatic storage management. (also from Preface)