It's a bit sad to me that people can only imagine writing code for large production systems. Static types are hugely beneficial in this area which is why we see this trend.

Personally I think Python moving in the direction of static typing is a mistake, dynamic typing is very useful for domains where python is strongest: modeling, statistics, scientific computing etc. It's also part of the basic design of Python to be a dynamic language. Likewise Ruby, with it's heavy use of metaprogramming, also benefits tremendously from a lack of types.

But let me be clear: I do think statically typed languages are a very good idea for large production systems, I just personally do a lot of programming that's not for these systems.

> How many statically typed languages optionally removed types?

I wouldn't say "removed" types, but I've been in software along enough to remember when dynamic typing was the big hot thing and crusty old Java devs complained that we couldn't possibly live without static type annotations. I distinctly remember when C# introduced `var` (which is of course really type inference, not dynamic typing) to appeal to devs that were growing weary of types.

There's a great example in SICP of implementing a full object system in just a few lines of code that would not be possible to implement as elegantly in a statically typed language. Do I want that for a production system? No. But there is, or at least used to be, a world of computation being done for reasons other that quickly getting PRs pushed out to prod.