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LMOL....yeah Microsoft needs Mono for legitimacy? From who??

You answered your own question later when you said:

FYI .NET has been around since 2000. It has been touted as cross platform and cross language. That has not materialized in the past 10 years.

The reason Microsoft needs Mono is exactly because they tout their platform as cross platform. You say that it hasn't materialized in 10 years, but here we are talking about being able to use Mono in Linux, iOS and now Android. As for cross language support, I can't see how you could possibly deny that claim!

The rest of your post just seems to say that if you only care about running on Windows then you use .NET, but if you want Linux support then you use Mono. That doesn't actually contradict what I said. And if nobody cares about Mono, when why are you bothering to post here about it?

As for ".Net" I do not trust it either. The creator of this language does not want the Internet to become what it can become, because it will damage their core business. [...] You wanted the truth, here is the truth.

.NET is a runtime environment, not a language. Examples of languages that run within the .NET environment are Assembly, C, C++, Haskell, Lisp, Perl, Python, Scala, and many many others. Speaking of the truth, you might want to do your homework before claiming you know it.

When articles claim Microsoft dropped the ball I think it's more wishful thinking than anything, because Windows programmers are in their Enterprise glory days right now, no longer restricted to VB and half-assed object models. Not anymore. We now have full OO features and much much more, and Java is playing cathup feature-wise. It's nice for a change.

I don't care how messy Microsoft's underlying code is, as long as they've tested it and ensure it works enough for me to program against it. The Microsoft security updates help a lot too. They're very frequent which means there are a lot of security flaws but they take care of them quickly (I'm sure I will get numerous examples where they didn't take care of security quickly but if you're on Windows update you see them coming thought all the time).

Yeah, I saw the list, but first off, half of those aren't real languages. (XPath? XSLT? First off, .NET supports them natively too, and secondly, those are not scripting languages.)

But as for your list, I'm just going to group them:

Languages that are also supported by .Net

AWK, Jaskell (as Haskell), Java (as J#), JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Scheme, Tcl, Xpath, XSLT

Template "Languages"

That is, languages designed to allow Java object values to be converted to text. (There are a thousand .Net things for this, too.)

EJS, FreeMarker, Jexl, Jst, Jeul, Velocity

Java Scripting Languages

These are languages that basically allow Java syntax to be used as a script

Beanshell, Java (gee), Judoscript

Niche Languages

And, finally, languages that no one uses because they're tied directly to Java in some way:

Groovy (calls itself Python/Ruby/Perl clone), OGNL (this might really be a template language, I can't tell), Pnuts (doesn't say what it is), Sleep (calls itself a Perl clone)

And Jelly

Jelly is a horrible, horrible idea. It tries to use XML as a scripting language, sort of like ANT (which is available for .NET as NANT). In much the same way as ANT and XSLT are horrible ideas, Jelly is a horrible idea.

And finally...

The languages I listed are a subset of languages .NET supports - namely, languages people have heard of before and weren't designed specifically for .NET.

Try a google search for ".net language" to get a better list of languages .NET supports. There are a lot.

http://www.saltypickle.com/rubydotnet
http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000049
And here's a list of more languages: http://dotnetpowered.com/languages.aspx

Until you bust out Haskell# or Lisp#. There are plenty of languages that run on the .NET framework and on the Java virtual machine.

You can't mix and match code within a project, although you can use vb/net libraries fine within c# programs and vice versa.

Said more correctly, you can't mix and match code within an assembly (generic term for "a compiled chunk of code", which could be a library (dll), an executable (exe), or even a separate sandbox within another assembly (.NET's XML serializer generates an assembly on the fly to serialize or deserialize XML, for example)). A "project" in Visual Studio compiles to a single assembly, either dll or exe, while a "solution" (which most people would think of as a "project") encompasses one or more "projects". Each "project" in your solution can be written in whichever language you like (MC++^WC++/CLI, C#, VB.NET, J#, F#, JScript.NET, IronPython, etc). The caveat is that your code must conform to the Common Language Specification (CLS) which is essentially a subset of language features that all .NET languages must implement. Languages are allowed to implement more features than those defined by CLS, but should not implement less. This does provide for some pretty arbitrary restrictions (no unsigned types), and some inclusions that may mean extensions to a language (like method overloading, which didn't exist in VB6). You can usually do what you want without worrying about CLS compliance, but every now and then you will get caught up in an issue where what you want to do in one language won't be accessible by another.

1. .NET works with more languages than just C#. Here's a list of languages supported by .NET: http://www.dotnetpowered.com/languages.aspx/. In contrast, Java only supports... well, Java.

C# is very similar to Java. The main difference is not C# vs. Java but .NET vs. Java.

What makes .NET more attractive?

1. .NET works with more languages than just C#. Here's a list of languages supported by .NET: http://www.dotnetpowered.com/languages.aspx/. In contrast, Java only supports... well, Java.

2. Some people find .NET's libararies (FCL) easier to use than Java's libraries.

There are two Pascal implementations for .NET listed here:

http://www.dotnetpowered.com/languages.aspx

I thought he was talking of Java the Language, as that's what the article is all about (Java bytecode).

Bytecode is platform, not language. All these languages can be compiled to MSIL (.NET bytecode). Likewise, all these languages can be compiled to bytecode for a JVM.

you can construct a language how ever you want and have it compile to Byte Code

It's been shown already that the Java byte code specification heavily favors a Java-style language, making it cumbersome to support a variety of others. In contrast, Microsoft designed .NET specifically to abstract out as much of the human-interface language as possible. One only as to look at the 40+ languages (available or in development for .NET) to see how "language friendly" .NET's design is http://www.dotnetpowered.com/languages.aspx/. In the 10+ years Java has been around, can you name any serious "alternative" language?

I think Java is better served if Sun calls the shots on it

This goes against the open source philosophy that the majority of successfully innovative programmers believe in.

I'd rather them or a small group of people call the shots on the language

This is the same thing as the committee that you, a few paragraphs above, rambled would stiffle "great artists". The same artists that you don't want to have a voice in things.