Interpreted languages are put together for ease and speed of programming, so the programmer gets stuff done quicker.

Compiled languages are put together to let the programmer work harder to create programs that have some kind of high performance. So the end product can be quicker, even if it more expensive to produce.

Only a few languages try to bridge the gap. Most notably Go. Go is compiled but is also set up to be easy to use. The result is a nice mixture of good performance and ease of programming. See golang.org.