I'm have used and am still using perl a lot. I'm working on improving my lisp experience - nothing really serious yet, compared to the perl work.

Lisp *is* very interesting. If you're curious, you could do a lot worse than to get the practical common lisp book (links to the freely available web version).

IMO, lisp doesn't have a high learning curve, especially not if you already know about things like symbols, closures, hash tables, packages etc. It looks different, but you really get used to the parentheses quickly and the language is pretty consistent.

I left vi for emacs a couple of years ago. it was worth the learning curve. And despite some people not liking it, Emacs (with Slime) is really the best (free) development environment, for lisp at least.