Perl has decades worth of high quality libraries to do heavy lifting. https://metacpan.org You can get away with easy scripting for creating significant programs.

UNIX commandline and Perl is a match made in heaven.

Using Golang will demand significantly more effort when doing more complex stuff but will give you concurrency, easier deploys/multi-platform support and better performance if doing CPU intensive stuff.

For learning I would highly recommend the following books:

  Beginning Perl by Ovid.
  Modern Perl by chromatic.

There are a lot of other good Perl books but some of them are getting old and it is better to already know a bit before reading so one can separate good from dated etc.