Didn't happen, but they became more popular. The fact is, that dynamic languages are great for small personal projects, or modular scripts, but if your project

Didn't happen, but they became more popular. The fact is, that dynamic languages are great for small personal projects, or modular scripts, but if your projects grow more than 10k Loc, and you have 2+ devs working on it, dynamic typing becomes a major liability. The raise of unit testing in the early 2003-2006, coincided with the raise of popularity of the Python web frameworks and Ruby on Rails. Suddenly Unit testing became a necessity, while previously it was a 'nice to have', as static typing covered a lot of the errors that dynamic languages introduced. Before 2005, in most places, 'integration testing' was the norm, but not unit testing. In the other hand, Objective-C took a very interesting turn, where it is a static typed language, but it is message oriented, and you can use it in a semi dynamic typing way. You can send a message (method call) to any object, which allows for interesting compositions (eg. [(id)myObject anyMethod] ). Calling a method on a nil object, doesn't raise exceptions, etc... I thought it made an awesome compromise. Unfortunately, Swift went the opposite way, which I didn't think was the right call. (as Java already covered that area well). Hence Swift hasn't taken off, appart from iOS as it didn't really introduce anything new, just little soup of paradigms that don't fundamentally make things much better. It was a missed opportunity.