[coolsunglasses]

Gilad Bracha has no idea what the hell he's talking about.

Rich hasn't worked on static languages and I'm not familiar with him having done anything in type theory. He wanted a nicer, practical Lisp first and foremost. A helpful compiler wasn't high on his list of priorities.

Guy Steele's most recent work has involved functional, statically typed programming languages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_(programming_language)

One of Friedman's most recent books http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTML/ was on ML which is a statically typed, functional programming language.

The smart people that weren't using static types back in the 70s and 80s weren't using them because the statically typed languages available back then were fuckin' awful except for ML and Miranda.

We can do a lot better as programmers these days. Stop giving yourself an excuse to not learn new things.