Hello. One of the Monastery's resident Common Lisp users here. I'd take that wager in a second. With the exception of certain things that Perl is explicitly optimized for (like regexes, string processing and such) I'd expect a quality Lisp (e.g. Lispworks, Allegro, CMUCL) to do much better. For example, I have considerable code doing numerical computations in Lisp, and it's typically not even worth rewriting it in (for example) C to attempt to get a speed improvement.