My assertion is that dynamic languages evolve faster because they are much easier to build--many of them start out as hobbyist languages (Ruby, Perl, etc.). Jus

My assertion is that dynamic languages evolve faster because they are much easier to build--many of them start out as hobbyist languages (Ruby, Perl, etc.). Just grab the dragon book and you're off to the races. In contrast, how often do you see hobbyists hacking around on new type systems? Much less often. Evolving type systems is typically the work of PhDs. Since static languages are harder to implement, they evolve slower. So, yes, syntax wise, they end up copying what the dynamic languages have already figured out what works/etc. As an admitted fan of static languages, I think that's just fine. It takes awhile for the static world to catch up. (E.g. Scala can now give you (basically) the sexy syntax of Ruby, 10 years after Ruby seduced a lot of JVM programmers away from Java, but now with a compiler backing up the syntax with type checking.) ...but, yeah, 10 years is a long time.