&gt; C# is awesome. I think it&#x27;s a spectacular language.<p>OCaml, Haskell and Lisp are spectacular. Erlang is spectacular. Tcl and Python
are spectacular. C# is an OK-language at best.<p>&gt; I&#x27;m not aware of any non-Java JVM languages prior to the CLR [...]<p>Except JVM&#x2F;Java had JPython, JRuby, and Rhino (JavaScript) earlier. Those are
interpreted, sure, but they were running inside JVM and talking to Java code
already when .NET was first published. The compilation to JVM bytecode is
a minor implementation detail.