Personally, if I wanted an interpreted language with bytecode, I much prefer C#. Much nicer language than Java. But the windows tools suck in my book (VS is slow as hell, their compilers are arcane, etc) and I much prefer Mono. The nice thing about Mono is that you can target every platform ever with it, including mobile.

So if I were contracted to write something business class in something interpreted, I'd definitely put C# with Mono at the top of the list. It is much nicer than Java to develop in, and has platform parity.