It makes me sad almost nobody mentions Perl and/or Perl6 (they are essentially entirely different languages, but designed by the same guy, so I'd say they follow similar design methodology). Although it is not as popular as it used to be, Perl is still extremely useful, and I found that the community around the language is by far the best and most welcoming to newcomers. Also a lot of people will say that Python is superior due to its readability, concise formatting etc., and indeed there are areas in which Python would be the better choice (machine learning and statistics to name a few) but for a quick file processing, OS admin tasks, or a simple multi-threaded web scraper, Perl would be my first choice. And I find that due to the flexibility and TMTOWTDI motto, I find the language much more expressive and I feel more creative writing Perl code. But I wouldn't dwell too much on picking the right scripting language, Python, Ruby, or Lua are all fine choices.

For lower level stuff and performance, definitely C++ and then eventually if you need it C as well, but I think it doesn't make much sense the other way round.

And as already said in this thread, it's good to pick up a functional language, just to broaden your horizon if nothing else.