For most purposes individual languages are less important than experience. Most competent programmers can pick up and be productive in a language they haven't previously used fairly quickly. So in a way it doesn't matter if it is Perl, Python, Ruby or a slew of other languages. As a practical thing you are likely to get much better support learning Perl here than learning any other language anywhere else, and in the long run that may be the most important criteria for picking your next language.