It was an interesting distinction in the nineties to make whether languages were interpreted or compiled. Then things got complicated when we started compiling

It was an interesting distinction in the nineties to make whether languages were interpreted or compiled. Then things got complicated when we started compiling things just in time. And then things got even more complicated when we started compiling compiled languages to imaginary instruction sets that we then interpreted at run time only to compile them just in time. To make things even more complicated, Java now has an ahead of time compiler too. Java was merely the one of such languages and instruction sets. If you look at WASM, it's exactly the same vision: a portable instruction set that can be run anywhere. Except this time it's optimized not for just one language but any language and the most popular languages on it currently are C++ and Rust, which are compiled languages not intended for this kind of thing. There are other ways to compare languages but their run times are a bit apples and oranges. Typing systems have evolved too. Java now has inferred types and ruby and python now have type annotations. The lines blurred. Purely dynamically typed languages still exist but are increasingly sidelined in favor of at least partially statically typed languages (e.g. Javascript vs Typescript). Assemblyscript takes that to the next level and compiles to WASM instead of Javascript. You see similar evolution in the Ruby ecosystem (e.g. Crystal). And the python ecosystem, which has multiple compilers. The distinction has ceased to be relevant. It's more about what kind of limitations you are willing to impose in exchange for performance. Rust makes a few very clever tradeoffs here where they do a lot of heavy lifting with templates to provide so-called zero cost abstractions. People even attempted REPLs for it. It's a scripting language!