Comment by pron

First of all, adding optional static typing is not "trying to stay current". You may be surprised (I certainly was), but at the last ECOOP it was very clear that the typed/untyped/optionally-typed debate is very much alive and well. Second, optional typing in itself is a hot topic (regardless of the merits of static typing), with some very interesting work. See, e.g. the extremely-powerful-but-not-yet-production-ready pluggable type systems supported by Java 8: http://types.cs.washington.edu/checker-framework/current/che..., or Gilad Bracha's optional types in Dart.