I think they're referring to any non-web language, e.g. if I could host and distribute C apps with the ease of the web. (Getting end-users to actually run and use a program with one click, rather than having to download a binary, run it separately, etc.)

Are you thinking of something along the lines of `ceylon run com.example.helloworld/1.0.0`? This command downloads the module if it's not locally available from the remote repository and then runs it to print "Hello, World!".