Programming languages and type systems are two fascinating subjects inside computer science, and there are plenty of sites devoted to them. They are great fields of research for academics (and the industry) and source of endless debate in the open source world and the blogosphere.
This week, static vs dynamic typing has been brought again to the front page by this (lengthy as usual) post by Steve Yegge. If you go through the transcript of this pretty interesting presentation you'll see that in the end, he really focuses on dynamic just-in-time compilation techniques, which are also available for statically typed languages (provided they are run through some kind of vm, such as the hotspot java virtual machine). Anyway, after (or in reaction to) this post a great amount of content in the subject has flourished.
As a debate in itself, it is really interesting because it's a good way to get introduced to new advances in both camps (and to discover the past, there many things that sound new but were invented decades ago). And in my opinion, it's endless in nature, as the only absolute truth may be that there is no language (nor type system) that fits best in all situations.
So in the end, in many cases is just a matter of personal preference. And even though I really get the value (and in many cases even the need) of dynamically-typed languages I have some personal bias towards static typing (I'm nearer to Cédric's position).
Ironically, I've found myself limited many times by the type system of the programming language at hand (mostly Java) but that has only increased my interest in learning the possibilities provided by languages with more expressive type systems (ML family, Haskell, Scala...).
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