Best server-side language for MySQL and PHP

So I have access to a dedicated server and want to finally create my game - it's a browser based game, fairly simple. I know PHP and MySQL fairly well and would want to integrate with them on the front end.

The question is what is a good server-side language to use either as a constant process or with cron to interface with the MySQL database to do calculations?

Ideally my requirements are:

As short a learning curve as possible.
Easiest access to MySQL as possible.
As hard to shoot yourself in the foot as possible.

I'd like to avoid C/C++ if possible for the above 'shoot yourself in the foot' problems. It'd also be nice to have a secondary language to use personally so I may take it beyond this limited scope.

Thanks in advance for any insights!

Solution

You could use commandline php with cron. The great advantage of that is that you can reuse libraries that you write for your game and you already know the language. I don't think it's performance is great though.

Besides that there are a ton of languages you might choose, Python and Java are popular.