I don't think this breaks my point. For example, I don't see of any reason a language could be compiled but not interpreted. And that alone breaks the idea that a language is necessarily either compiled or interpreted.
Moreover, the distinction that Shutt makes in this blogpost between compiled and interpreted is not very clear: most of what he says rings more to me as a distinction between static and dynamic rather than between compiled and interpreted, but I concede that I read the blogpost rather quickly and without taking the time to fully grasp everything.
Re:Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours (1997)
by khedoros1 on Saturday November 04, 2017 @02:08PM
(#15626173)
Interpreters are more flexible; I'd expect that any compiled language could also be interpreted. I'd expect that at least some languages where the canonical implementation is an interpreter could also have an ahead-of-time compiler implementation, but that some of those languages would have at least sections of the program that need to be just-in-time compiled (or even recompiled) at runtime. That would pose extra difficulty in making a compiled implementation of the language.
Here's what Shutt has to say about the difference between interpreted and compiled languages: https://fexpr.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/interpreted-programming...
tl;dr: The choice of compiled vs interpreted is made early on and greatly affects the design of the language semantics early on.