I suggest you let your friend read Ten Perl Myths, especially "Perl is too slow".
About the other languages: C and C++ programs execute faster, Basic programs are a lot slower. Java's speed depends on a lot of things, and I know nothing about COBOL and Pascal.
For a lot of things, it's better to have speedy development instead of speedy execution.

Think about how you would write this in C(++):

push @foo, [ split /:/ ] while <>;
print map { "$_->[0]\n" } sort { $a->[2] <=> $b->[2] } @foo;
# Two lines, for clarity.
# Of course I could have used another map.
[download]

The C(++) equivalent may execute a lot faster, but how long does programming it take? I guess it'll take longer than the one minute I spent on it.

2;0 juerd@ouranos:~$ perl -e'undef christmas'
Segmentation fault
2;139 juerd@ouranos:~$
[download]