The reason (yes, "the" reason, hah!) is because the interpreted languages could be more rapidly developed and, because they were dynamically typed, were able to

The reason (yes, "the" reason, hah!) is because the interpreted languages could be more rapidly developed and, because they were dynamically typed, were able to expand their feature set into something practical and flexible that statically typed languages are still catching up on. It's just much harder to design a good statically typed language without sacrificing features or convenience or hacks that you can get from free-wheeling interpreted languages Before LLVM, statically typed, compiled languages got bogged down in a lot of stuff that wasn't language design. They still do though.