What Charles says without actually saying, and what I find most interesting, is that the new age of platform war will be waged on VMs. In that case, I don't think Charlie has anything to worry about. The JVM may not be all peaches and cream, but it's at least as good or better than the CLR, and Parrot hasn't reached critical mass yet. LLVM is interesting, but aims a bit below all of these. What I'd really like to see…
How is it better than the CLR? !troll, I'm genuinely curious.
Mono is one to watch, though.