In a recent piece called Strong Typing vs. Strong Testing, noted programmer and author Bruce Eckel makes an argument that dynamically typed languages such as Python are superior to statically typed languages such as Java and C++. I've done quite a bit of Python and Java programming, and even a little C++, so I can appreciate his position, but I think the conclusion goes too far. Whether Python is more productive than C++ or Java is one thing, whether static typing in general should be abandoned is quite another.
N. Beckman, D. Kim, and J. Aldrich. ECOOP 2011 – Object-Oriented Programming, volume 6813 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, (2011)