Do you know that John Tobey has written two modules that allow you to use Perl inside Emacs procedures? You still need to learn Emacs-Lisp, but you do not write Lisp programs. You write Perl programs that call Emacs-Lisp functions.

One additional note: I could not install Perlmacs, but one the other side EPL runs fine on my Emacs.

Another additional note: for very short functions, just use Lisp. But for more than, say, 5 or 6 lines, I prefer to use Perl with EPL.

Oops, I forgot John Tobey's: http://www.perl.com/CPAN-local/modules/by-authors/id/J/JT/JTOBEY/