I think the paper is even worse, in that it spreads confusion about what an Interpreter for a programming language actually is, what it does and what it provides.

The paper fails to define the concept of what to call an Interpreter. A bytecode interpreter is entirely different from a Lisp interpreter, which actually runs from source structures. Mixing VMs into the picture makes it only worse.

Part of the reason may be that they don't understand what an Interpreter actually provides and why it is used.