[shanemhansen]

Languages are by far not the most important thing. My recommendation to you would be to go with ruby, despite the fact that I'm not a ruby programmer.

Ruby borrows lots of syntax from perl so you'll feel at home. It's obviously a first-class citizen on the web these days (RoR much?), and the ruby community has a perl-like focus on getting sh*t done + testing.

(Disclaimer, my weapons of choice are python and go. go because it's not often internet giants of that caliber get together an invent a language, the last one turned out to have a pretty long shelf life. Python because it's simple, clean, and lots of other non-specific adjectives. Actually I think I came to python because I wanted a free matlab and stayed for the KoolAid).