It is definitely not the "shiny new thing" it once was in the mid-nineties and early millennium, but Scala and Clojure have show that the JVM is a versatile platform that can keep up with the latest trends. I did a summer research internship using Scala and was a very eye-opening experience. I know Sonar (
http://sonar.me) uses it in production and it definitely has the potential to grow into a widely-adopted language, especially since more and more people become acquainted with functional programming paradigms.