I want to spend some time learning a general-purpose interpreted language. I know a little Perl, but not a lot, and just a little Ruby. I've also used Octave/MATLAB and R/S fairly extensively, but those languages are more special-purpose than general-purpose. I haven't really used other similar languages. Now I want to learn one and get good at it. What is the best choice? I want my choice to be future-oriented. I can see why Perl is a good choice because of all the Perl code out there (especially in bioinformatics), but I'm wondering if I should learn Ruby instead of Perl. Not sure -- how do the futures of Perl and Ruby look to you guys? Or is there an even better choice than either of those two? I will want to use the language to manipulate data files, but I also want to be able to do more with web application frameworks and model-view-controller systems. So Ruby on Rails would be a possible direction, but I'm not sure if knowing Ruby actually helps with understanding Ruby on Rails. All opinions are welcome! Mike