I'm going to buck the general trend here, and recommend that your next language not be Perl, Python, or Ruby. If you really want to become a well-balanced programmer, you should either learn a lower-level, compiled language like C or Java, or you should stretch a bit and try Lisp/Scheme or Erlang.
Working only within the "scripting language" space of the typical LAMP stack will limit your thinking in ways that could hurt you later on.
Working only within the "scripting language" space of the typical LAMP stack will limit your thinking in ways that could hurt you later on.