I have an issue with that statement. No languages are inherently "compiled" or "interpreted", that's a property of the implementation.
If we are talking about CPython here, Python code is compiled to bytecode which is then interpreted. Not unlike Java - with the difference that the main implementation has a JIT and afaik, Python's does not.
But that's CPython. What about PyPy? It has a JIT.
A language and it's implementation are usually designed at the same time. Compiled or interpreted will affect design choices that go into the language. While additional implementations may follow, it can be hard/impossible to design a compiler (machine code, not byte code) for a language that was designed to be interpreted without dropping features (ie eval).
It may be more correct to say 'Python was designed to be interpreted' than 'Python is interpreted'
I think this just illustrates the fuzziness of these definitions. A compiler is just a piece of code; you can embed it into another piece of code and run it whenever necessary. Maybe in the world of shrink-wrapped desktop software there was a sharp distinction between AOT compiled languages and interpreted ones, but we haven't lived in that world for a couple decades now.
Of course, this doesn't address issues of incremental evaluation which often requires additional semantics for compiled languages.
> You can run C++ or Java with run-time type-checking, but it doesn't conform the to spec.
I'm not sure what you mean by "conforming with the spec". You can opt out of type checking by using only `object` or `void*`. But golang has a mode where you run a go file directly and a mode where you generate a binary. There are no traditional interpreted languages anymore (or at least only very few). And what we call "compiled" languages today are not actually compiled ones. The way Java runs is closer to how JavaScript runs than to how C runs. It's only about the interface the offer to developers.
That said, for more precise discussions, what you pointed out is valid and important. One of the early questions I ask in a programming interview is to explain some high-level differences between two languages they're familiar with, which is often Java and Python. One of the common responses I get is that Java compiles to bytecode which is executed by a VM, while Python is interpreted. Of course, I point out that CPython is also compiled to bytecode and executed by a VM.
Anyway, all of those terms do communicate something, even if tomorrow they may wrongly describe the language.