I saw a talk that touched on this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tml94je2edk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tml94je2edk He explains that dynamicall

I saw a talk that touched on this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tml94je2edk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tml94je2edk He explains that dynamically-typed languages like Python, Ruby, and JS became popular in the 90s because they offered a fast feedback loop for website building, and they didn't need an IDE or compilers, which were slow (and often not free). It ended up not being worth trading your development time for the performance increase when all your users were connecting via 56k modem anyway. The talk makes a lot of other cool points about how development has changed in the past decade or two, and why the trend is moving back to static typing.