Get friends and teachers with actual working experience?

In my experience, the more languages you learn from different language families, the better programmer you will be. Perl is a particularly good multiparadigm language in the sense that it's Algol-like in syntax but fairly malleable. It also has some complex linguistic notions such as topics and context.

It's helpful also to learn a strongly OO language (Smalltalk is good), Scheme or Lisp, a pure functional language (Haskell, ML, Ocaml, or maybe Factor, though I haven't used it), and a logic programming language (Prolog, though Make might do at a pinch).