Fads, or steadfast pursuit of balancing tradeoffs and finding clever ways to improve tools? Compilation and interpretation both have distinct advantages. It's

Fads, or steadfast pursuit of balancing tradeoffs and finding clever ways to improve tools? Compilation and interpretation both have distinct advantages. It's hard to do both (read: it took a while) and each has tradeoffs. I'm impressed and grateful that I can get compile time errors for interpreted languages, and I'd feel the same about being able to use a compiled lang in a repl. Regarding the actual topic at hand, this isn't compiled JavaScript, just parsed JavaScript. They're shipping an AST, not bytecode/machine code.