Some of my first programming work was embedded programming on a 6809 for a statistical multiplexer. Later, it was in 68000 assembler and C for a bigger stat mux; I wrote C for about 15 years, by which time I was starting to get into scripting, and found awk, which led to Perl. As this was the mid to late 90s, I suspect Python and Ruby didn't exist yet, so Perl was the obvious choice for me.

You've already received some suggestions to try both languages -- I heartily recommend you try that. Go ahead and try to solve some problems you currently have with Perl, Python and Ruby -- see what language suits you, see how the community supports you.

I'm happy to say that I still have a little smile on my face whenever I start writing a new piece of Perl. It's a great language, still under development, and the killer app is CPAN, a varied library of Everything Under The Sun.

I hope this makes your little voice happy!