Maybe I will learn python after I get my head wrapped around perl then 
Python is great. But....
Python is object oriented. A lot of people have a hard time understanding object oriented concepts because for most of the things they do, procedural is good enough (small projects, programs,etc). Perl is like a mash up of C, shell, awk, sed, and the kitchen sink. There's more than one way to do it (that's the motto). You can get caught up in the all of the idiosyncracies of syntax, but you can also make it very clean and understandable. I've heard C programmers say that perl looks like line noise. That's because you can fit a 1000 line C program into a command line length perl statement to accomplish the same thing.
Php is nice too, but I'd prefer to stick to perl for sysadmin or task oriented things, and php for web development, although php is quite capable of both (just not as popular). If you're working from a UNIX based system, one of the hard things to beat about perl is perldoc and the man pages. Python has an excellent help system, but I find it a bit more tedious to use.
Decide what you're going to do. Are you a scripter or are you a programmer with a computer science objective? I think if you're a scripter, ie, can whip up bash scripts, etc, then perl is going to feel natural to you. If you're a programmer with a CS slant, go with something more programmer like, such as python, C or C++, or java. You'll get more out of it.
/gC
