Ps: welcome again Ceylon, hope you'll give RedHat a brighter future in the enterprise.
From late 80's to mid 90's (I think) there was even a magazine called Computer Language that focused almost exclusively on writing about different programming languages.
It was common to see articles about writing compilers and interpreters for your own languages in various magazines. One Amiga magazine I picked up in 1990 in Germany included a listing for a full (tiny) compiler for a Pascal inspired language.
Some languages, like Go, implement a different edition directly atop many various OS's, with their own garbage collection and type inference. Whereas others, like Coffeescript, are text generators sitting atop and relying on features of other languages. And there's many shades in between, such as languages that produce JVM bytecode rather than executables for each different hardware target the JVM sits atop.
Then there's the issue of how much support atop the text files a language directly supports. Some, like Kotlin, make IDE support an official policy, whereas others, like Java, don't, instead relying on third parties to provide it. Some languages only provide the visual interface. Macros, like in Clojure, and compiler directives, like in C, could also be considered "atop the text file syntax".
If readable source code in some certain language can be generated from a VM or an AST that many different "languages" target, then in a sense they're not really languages at all, only "bytecode generators" or "transpilers".
Ceylon seems like a very nicely designed language (and I don't mean syntax). I would love to see a LLVM back end and the requisite docs for low level system hacking.