This distinction is both illogical and ahistorical. Python is a scripting language that has a compiler. Indeed, any scripting language can be translated into a compilable language and then compiled, a process called transpiling.

There's also Java, which definitely compiles down to bytecode, but for a machine which physically doesn't exist. The Java Virtual Machine is an emulator that runs on supported hardware, in order to execute Java programs. Since the Java compiler does not produce, say, x86 assembly, your definition would assert that Java is not a compiled language, despite obviously having a compiler.

As an exercise for everyone else, also have a look at Lisp, a very-clear programing language with a compiler, but some specially-built machines were constructed that optimized for Lisp programs, with hardware support to do checks that would take longer on other architectures.

You are talking about the compiler, not the language itself. Humans program in programming languages such as JavaScript and C to write computer programs. The code is human readable text in both cases. Both are code to describe how a program operates. Therefore C and JavaScript are programming languages.

With your logic, is Python not a programming language? The common compiler is an interpreter. But there are also real compilers that produce machine code. What about C# and Dotnet langauges and Java? They produce Bytecode that needs to be interpreted by an interpreter and executed at runtime, as these are not machine code yet. Are those not programming languages?

Yeah you clearly don’t know how modern languages work. Most “scripting languages” are compiled nowadays, in a preprocess step.

https://github.com/wizardpisces/js-ziju