Well the several levels I was thinking about are --in-- something like:

  * Goal
  * Language features (related to the stated goal)
  * Available tools
  * Integration in other projects (aka, as hyper or community adoption)
  * Performance
  * Etc (love this one)

But, as you can see, is not something that I thought really well. My idea is that there is a rising number of languages build around the JVM. Giving you a more or less the same infrastructure as in the .Net side. So I'm interested givin a look to all the languages out there that tap into the JVM: Java, Beanshell, Groovy, Scala, JRuby, JPython, J...

Now that you've raised the question, what would be a good comparison framework for this task?