They aren't unrelated or orthoganal skills, just different points on a spectrum. fwiw nobody is asking you to learn runtime design if you don't want to. If you

They aren't unrelated or orthoganal skills, just different points on a spectrum. fwiw nobody is asking you to learn runtime design if you don't want to. If you want only to compile new 'language designs' down to existing VMs,bytecode etc, then sure, you have that option (and you always had this option once the first 'host runtime' was in existence). All I am saying is that one needs to be careful not to paint with too broad a brush, and reccomend that no one explore runtime design because we have all these platforms already and it is 'too hard' (so don't go there).