I recommend watching the talk Why static typing came back. The thesis of the talk is that static typing made a comeback because most of its perceived drawbacks have been addressed by newer languages. For example:
- Verbosity → type inference
- bad for heterogeneous data → generics, typeclasses
- slow iteration → incremental compilers and LSP
At the end of the talk Feldman concludes that dynamic languages will not return to the mainstream (ever) because of insurmountable challenges regarding performance and static analysis. I agree with this conclusion, with some caveats.
First, dynamic languages are not inherently slower (otherwise this whole Julia thing wouldn’t make sense).
Second, there are problems that are not amenable to static analysis, namely, meta-programming problems: multistaged programming, computer algebra, AD, etc. So the idea that static languages are enough to model any problem might make sense for web developers (i.e. most developers including the intended audience for Feldman’s language), but it’s not true in general.
Dynamic languages will fade from the mainstream, not because they’re worse, but because their benefits (over the statically typed) are only manifest in domains that require metaprogrammability, which are rather niche.