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Everyone will benefit, even the Java community: Now that there's competition again, new constructs are—surprise!—again being considered for Java

Do languages have to sacrifice anything?

.NET goes much further: A routine written in a language L1 may call another routine written in a different language L2. A module in L1 may declare a variable whose type is a class declared in L2, and then call the corresponding L2 routines on that variable. If both languages are object oriented, a class in L1 can inherit from a class in L2. Exceptions triggered by a routine written in L1 and not handled on the L1 side will be passed to the caller, which—if written in L2—will process it using L2's own exception-handling mechanism. During a debugging session, you may move freely and seamlessly across modules written in L1 and L2. I don't know about you, but I've never seen anything coming even close to this level of interoperability.

Then just use the ExWebClient class to make your requests;

Public Class CookieWebClient : Inherits WebClient ' overridden to add cookie headers to http requests. Protected Overrides Function GetWebRequest(ByVal address As System.Uri) As System.Net.WebRequest Dim request As WebRequest = MyBase.GetWebRequest(address) If TypeOf request Is HttpWebRequest Then DirectCast(request, HttpWebRequest).CookieContainer = _cookies End If Return request End Function ' overridden to save cookies to the container for http requests. Protected Overrides Function GetWebResponse(ByVal request As System.Net.WebRequest) As System.Net.WebResponse Dim response As WebResponse = MyBase.GetWebResponse(request) If TypeOf response Is HttpWebResponse Then _cookies.Add(response.ResponseUri, DirectCast(response, HttpWebResponse).Cookies) End If Return response End Function ' overridden to save cookies to the container for async http requests. Protected Overrides Function GetWebResponse(ByVal request As System.Net.WebRequest, ByVal result As System.IAsyncResult) As System.Net.WebResponse Dim response As WebResponse = MyBase.GetWebResponse(request, result) If TypeOf response Is HttpWebResponse Then _cookies.Add(response.ResponseUri, DirectCast(response, HttpWebResponse).Cookies) End If Return response End Function Private Shared _cookies As CookieContainer = New CookieContainer End Class

2) If you are BIG fan of dynamics languages (closures, meta programming, and all that cool stuff) then consider giving Smalltalk a look.  You might like what you see.  Its like Ruby but with bigger muscles.  You think Rails is cool? Check out seaside. In the end we’ll see a up tick in Smalltalk momentum over the next few years. 

Please don’t talk about Smalltalk. I enjoy my competitive advantage over the Java/NET crowd

Where Smalltalk really shines recently is in field of web applications due to its dynamic nature (live upgrading, debugging etc.) and because its shortcoming are not relevant here.