I really like the CLR idea that is used in Microsoft .NET
A CLR lets you run programs as a mix of programs written in several different languages. Zope is another such framework. You can use either Python, Perl or PHP for scripting; but that's a much higher level and with a different goal.
The story of Parrot is funny. It started as a April's fool joke, but was later taken seriously and is now a serious open source project.
"Parrot is now the name of a proposed virtual machine that should be able to run Perl as well as Python code." Read more here
This article describes it better.