Dynamic typing is outdated?!
I have some professional experience in rewriting Python and Ruby programmes in Haskell. I make the same amount of stupid mistakes in Python as in Haskell. But whereas Python blows up at runtime / test time, in Haskell it's the compiler yelling at me. The nice thing: that's much faster to detect, and also saves me writing about half the tests.
Don't get me wrong, dynamic typing beats inane static typing like C's or Java's. But good static typing beats dynamic typing.
I like the final result of safety, and how whole classes of bugs are excluded once I get my OCaml program to compile. But the process of getting my program to compile in the first place is pretty painful and not fun.
Then again, writing endless unit tests in a dynamically typed language like Scheme is not much fun either. But I don't have to write the unit tests until I've written some functional portion of my program (or even the whole thing) and am satisfied with its design and how it works. Then I could add unit tests or even rewrite it in a safe language like OCaml, if I wanted to.
As I said elsewhere in this thread, for fast prototyping and sheer pleasure of programming, I find Scheme very hard to beat.
On the Scheme side of things, I've heard that the newish (4.8.0 and up) versions of Chicken can perform flow analysis to catch some type errors at compile time, and optimize based on types.
There's also Typed Racket, and Chicken has a contracts egg that allows procedures to have pre- and post- conditions.
For some years now, I've heard predictions that in the future languages will allow their users to "dial up" or "dial down" safety features on demand. I guess the above features of Scheme and Haskell are some early steps along that path. We live in interesting times.
-XTypeHoles will be in GHC 7.8: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC/TypeHoles
Static typing has its place in some people's hearts, and I respect that, but saying that dynamic typing has been outdated since the 80s is (1) trolling, and (2) happens to also just be, like, your opinion, man.
Oh, and please excuse my snarky tone. Your ancestor comment seemed to ask for it. Yes, they are, even now, languages around that are even worse. But better ways have been around for ages. A similar example is garbage collection: It, too, has been around since basically the dawn of programming languages, but only made serious inroads into the mainstream in the last decades.
The value of 3 / x changing depending on whether I pass 2 or 2.0 is the trade-off of the Python approach, and I honestly don't know which I prefer.
Java, Python, Ruby, and Clojure will seem outdated just like C++ seems outdated now (not that it doesn't have its uses).
Additionally when doing big projects where the team does not care for unit testing, dynamic typing can turn out to be a big problem.
Having said this, it has its places, I do use dynamic languages a lot, just not in big enterprise projects.