Learning ***** as a second language

[bronto]

Fellow monks

I work as a System Administrator, and I extensively use Perl every time that this means that it can help me to accomplish my job faster, automatically or more easily, that means: often.

Of course, I know how to make some shell scripting and I know how to mix grep, awk, sed together but...

...but I feel that it would be a good thing to know another programming language besides Perl, too.

I tried to think about it, but there is too much noise around (Java! Java!, or use Python!, or why not PHP?)... so much noise that I can't understand what is the good answer to the question:

What language would be more useful for a System Administrator that already knows Perl and wants to learn a second programming language?

Any good advice?

Thanks a lot