I understand you're not bashing other languages, I just get tired of these tautologies getting trotted out anytime someone complains about perl so I decided to challenge them.
>The author claims that where most people write C in Perl, his book is an attempt to convince you to write Lisp in Perl.
Wouldn't it be less work to just write Lisp in Lisp?
Lots of people would be happy to use lisp instead of Perl or other scripting languages.
For instance, the CPAN module Devel::Declare is a sad excuse for real lisp macros but, afaik, it is still better than most anything else.
(Lisp dialects are sadly seldom possible to use for lack needed libraries like good Unicode support, etc.)
(Btw, Mark Jason Dominus wrote "Higher-Order Perl" http://hop.perl.plover.com/)
If you want beautiful Perl, pick up Kaufmann's "Higher-Order Perl." It has a number of functional design patterns and ideas which are useful and elegant. The author claims that where most people write C in Perl, his book is an attempt to convince you to write Lisp in Perl.