Once you learned some basics like functions, loops, conditionals or classes, there are some huge families (object-oriented, functional, procedural,...) but inside a family there are little differences. Like "def" in python is "sub" in perl. You should care more about questions like tool-support (is there an IDE?) and libraries or frameworks.

You should never start coding without wondering "am I the first person on this planet solving this particular problem or might there be libraries I could use instead of reinventing the wheel?" Since you are using bash/grep/sed/awk/bc/etc already, I believe you are pretty close to perl anyway. And perl has CPAN, a central repository where people can show off their code and find great libraries. Personally, I believe perls huge success wasn't caused by the language (which I consider to be quite annoying), but by CPAN. You need a perl-library? Go to CPAN. You need a C-library? Aehm, try google...

But I often have the feeling that perl-coders don't really cooperate. Perhaps that's not their mindset, perhaps they just can't agree on a common coding style ("there is more than one way to do it" and you will understand what that means after reading some code from different programmers), but in the end they seem to be more likely to start a new module at CPAN instead of improving an existing one, so looking for a module can quickly result in evaluating five different modules done for the same purpose, just to find out that three of them have seen no updates for at least a year and another one is lacking documentation.

Pythons CPAN is PIP and to me it seems like there are fewer modules, but it is easier to find good ones. For example, try finding a good library for logging and a good one for reading config-files in CPAN and PIP.

tl;dr: try defining some aspects like "tool support" or "top 5 libraries I will need" and check perl, python and ruby. Then decide by those aspects. There is more to a car than simply the engine.

Once you learned some basics like functions, loops, conditionals or classes, there are some huge families (object-oriented, functional, procedural,...) but inside a family there are little differences. Like "def" in python is "sub" in perl. You should care more about questions like tool-support (is there an IDE?) and libraries or frameworks. You should never start coding without wondering "am I the first person on this planet solving this particular problem or might there be libraries I could use instead of reinventing the wheel?" Since you are using bash/grep/sed/awk/bc/etc anyway, I believe you are pretty close to perl anyway. And perl has CPAN, a central repository where people can show off their code and find great libraries. Personally, I believe perls huge success wasn't caused by the language (which I consider to be quite annoying), but by CPAN. You need a perl-library? Go to CPAN. You need a C-library? Aehm, try google... But I often have the feeling that perl-coders don't really cooperate. Perhaps that's not their mindset, perhaps they just can't agree on a common coding style ("there is more than one way to do it" and you will understand what that means after reading some code from different programmers), but in the end they seem to be more likely to start a new module at CPAN instead of improving an existing one, so looking for a module can quickly result in evaluating five different modules done for the same purpose, just to find out that three of them have seen no updates for at least a year and another one is lacking documentation. Pythons CPAN is PIP and to me it seems like there are fewer modules, but it is easier to fond good ones. For example ,try finding a good library for logging and a good one for reading config-files in CPAN and PIP. tl;dr: try defining some aspects like "tool support" or "top 5 libraries I will need" and check perl, python and ruby. Then decide by those aspects. There is more to a car than simply the engine.