In an interview with Alan Kay, one of the inventors of Smalltalk, we see one of the reasons why statically typed languages are still preferred today to dynamic languages like Perl, Smalltalk, Python and Lisp:
In the 1980s, Kay explains, Intel and Motorola were not producing processors that could run these higher level languages. As a result, programmers interested in performance were programming in C and early bound languages. When Stroustrop developed C++ he wasn't trying to emulate the work done at PARC, he was creating support for objects using a preprocessor for C. The relationship between C++ and C was much like the relationship between SIMULA and Algol. Kay sees Java as falling between Smalltalk and C++. In some ways it is an improvement, in other ways it is mainly C++ with garbage collection. One of the most obvious deficiencies of Java, says Kay, is that "Java has a difficult time of adding to itself."In essence, much of the art and craft of programming today is still bound by the limitations found in the IBM Model 5150 (the original IBM PC).
-Dom
