I must have missed the memo explaining why static typing is always better. Can you forward it to me?

Lisp [is] stuck in the past...

You lose a little credibility here for not specifying which lisp you mean. I'll assume you mean Common Lisp because:

- Scheme is in the middle of reinventing itself after the R6RS unpleasantness, and that process could have any number of interesting repercussions.

- Clojure is very young, and already has a good chance of becoming the first mainstream functional programming language. I'll leave the value of that distinction unspecified for now, but it would be interesting.

- Some of the features available to Common Lisp programmers in the past really are impossible to duplicate today, and will probably remain so for the forseeable future. By all accounts, the system-level introspection and debugging capabilities available on Lisp Machines were a real treat to operate. We can reasonably disagree about how useful it might be to have OS, toolchain, editor, and system software all written in the same language and presenting a uniform interface, but I don't see how anyone could claim that ML and Haskell have surpassed Lisp on this point.