The language in the article is just such a thing! The difference is essentially between statements (AKA instructions) and expressions (AKA values). Statements

The language in the article is just such a thing! The difference is essentially between statements (AKA instructions) and expressions (AKA values). Statements are executed one after another to produce effects(/actions). That is "imperative" programming. In contrast, expressions represent values, and we evaluate(/reduce/simplify) them over and over. Sometimes they reach a "normal form" (i.e. a "final result"), other times they may end up in a loop. This may be called "value-oriented programming", and pure functional programming is one example. The language in the article is similarly "value-oriented", although it isn't "pure" since it allows effects in its expressions, which requires careful choice of which order to evaluate things in. In Haskell, for example, "programs" are just expressions representing some sort of value. It just-so-happens that when a Haskell program is 'executed', what actually happens is we look for a value called "main", we evaluate it to get a value, and that value just-so-happens to have the type "imperative program" (technically it's called "IO a"). That "imperative program" value is then handed over to an interpreter to be executed. Well, conceptually at least; those tasks are actually interleaved so the code is executed "on demand", and the whole thing can get smushed together by an aggressive compiler. Still, it sounds very much like your two-stage language.