I was just wondering what language would be a good choice for developing a game server to support a large (thousands) number of users? I dabbled in python, but realized that it would just be too much trouble since it doesn't spawn threads across cores (meaning an 8 core server=1 core server). I also didn't really like the language (that "self" stuff grossed me out).
I know that C++ is the language for the job in terms of performance, but I hate it. I don't want to deal with its sloppy syntax and I like my hand to be held by managed languages. This brings me to C# and Java, but I am open to other languages. I love the simplicity of .NET, but I was wondering if, speed wise, this would be good for the job. Keep in mind since this will be deployed on a Linux server, it would be running on the Mono framework - not sure if that matters. I know that Java is syntax-wise very similar to .Net, but my experience with it is limited. Are there any frameworks out there for it or anthing to ease in the development?
Please help me and my picky self arrive on a solution.
UPDATE: I didn't mean to sound so picky, and I really don't think I was. The only language I really excluded was C++, Python I don't like because of the scalability problem. I know that there are ways of communicating between processes, but if I have an 8 core server, why should I need to make 8 processes? Is there a more elegant solution?
I might be going slightly off-topic here, but the topic interests me as I have (hobby-wise) worked on quite a few game servers (MMORPG servers) - on others' code as well as mine. There is literature out there that will be of interest to you, drop me a note if you want some references.
One thing that strikes me in your question is the want to serve a thousand users off a multithreaded application. From my humble experience, that does not work too well. :-) 
When you serve thousands of users you want a design that is as modular as possible, because one of your primary goals will be to keep the service as a whole up and running. Game servers tend to be rather complex, so there will be quite a few show-stopping bugs. Don't make your life miserable with a single point of failure (one application!).
Instead, try to build multiple processes that can run on a multitude of hosts. My humble suggestion is the following:

Make them independent, so a failing process will be irrelevant to the service.
Make them small, so that the different parts of the service and how they interact are easy to grasp.
Don't let users communicate with the gamelogic OR DB directly. Write a proxy - network stacks can and will show odd behaviour on different architectures when you have a multitude of users. Also make sure that you can later "clean"/filter what the proxies forward.
Have a process that will only monitor other processes to see if they are still working properly, with the ability to restart parts.
Make them distributable. Coordinate processes via TCP from the start or you will run into scalability problems.
If you have large landscapes, consider means to dynamically divide load by dividing servers by geography. Don't have every backend process hold all the data in memory.

I have ported a few such engines written in C++ and C# for hosts operating on Linux, FreeBSD and also Solaris (on an old UltraSparc IIi - yes, mono still runs there :). From my experience, C# is well fast enough, considering on what ancient hardware it operates on  that sparc machine.
The industry (as far as I know) tends to use a lot of C++ for the serving work and embeds scripting languages for the actual game logic. Ah, written too much already - way cool topic.
Good language to develop a game server in?