[externedguy]

> Why interpret at all?

a tiny part of points that come to my mind:

- education

- iteration on writing simple functionality

- loading and trying out several APIs to see what's possible (I use it frequently with Elixir / Erlang for example)

It makes life easier for newcomers to wrap their head around something and produce a good solution rather than a "working" one

[fluoridation]

But the "interpretation" is kind of in name only. When you run your program there's still going to be a compilation step, it's just the interpreter will merge it with the run step, and it will do it every time you run the program. I'm with the GP, I don't understand the advantage of this approach over traditional AOT compilation (actually this isn't even JIT, it's just deferred AOT).