in reply to Possible Next Steps

I studied several computer languages, beginning with COBOL in the 1980s, then various versions of BASIC and now Perl with various little excursions to other languages (FORTRAN, APL, ADA, Pascal, Forth, Assembler, C, Lisp, ...), but I never considered it as a form of stepping stones to some "higher" language.

Unless you have a very clear idea what kind of language you need for your job, I'd say you just learn a language that catches your fancy.

CountZero

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom