On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 4:11 AM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones@redhat.com> wrote:

One major reason is that it allows languages to be mixed and to call
easily from one language to another.  Free software dropped the ball
on this (Parrot), and Mono/.Net is the only widely available
implementation of this idea.

It was *marketed* as such, but in fact many different languages have run on the JVM for a long time:
http://www.robert-tolksdorf.de/vmlanguages.html
Some of them date to 1996.

Practically speaking there are many modern languages available such as
Objective Caml: http://ocamljava.x9c.fr/
Ruby: http://jruby.codehaus.org/
Python: http://jython.org/Project/
Scala: http://www.scala-lang.org/