A question about the landscape of programming languages in game dev

Actual question: Say you're building a piece of software; the exact details are unimportant here other than to say it's an application, that it runs on a server and talks to a database while providing a service over the network. You want to write it in a language that's reasonably modern and has reasonably uncomplicated memory management (so, C++ is right out). At this point there are dozens of options, but here's another constraint: you want to be able to eventually hand this codebase off to a programmer whose background is almost certainly going to be in the games industry, not software engineering more generally. So you don't necessarily want to do it in, say, Haskell where you'll struggle to find a guy who can deal with that down the line. What do you use? The obvious answer is C#, but let's also say that you don't want to ever touch anything with Microsoft's stink on it ever again. Lua? Is the answer here Lua? As much as I like Lua I don't know that it fits here. Is there another…