There's a good take on programming language evolution over at Reflective Surface. I won't quote a lot; there's way too much good stuff to extract - go read it yourself. This segment stood out to me though:

Another concept that has gained wider acceptance in the last years is that of dynamic typing. Many modern languages have opted for dynamic typing to improve productivity and reduce errors. It's curious that Java and C#, languages created with market considerations in mind, use static typing, and are forced to provide resources to "violate" that concept because of its failings. (Boxing is one of such "violations", which tries to remedy the gap between value and reference types in those languages.)

Yeah, it's as if the language designers almost got it, and then fell back on more confortable, but less useful paradigms...