The reality it is the reliance on tools and sucky education. I wrote a compiler for taking a less-sucky C#/C hybrid compiler to PHP (why php? so I could get things done and hack it when needed): See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=226480
Reality: taking it to production was nice, but debugging and other tools are not available. I spent a lot of time making it possible to debug the PHP and trace that back to C#. This was less than idea.
Then IDE support. While I can happy without an IDE, most people can hardly function.
Trying to educate people on it was (a) marketing fail [web devs hate static typing], and (b) too hard for people to grasp (functional programming + new stuff = fail sauce).
Reality: taking it to production was nice, but debugging and other tools are not available. I spent a lot of time making it possible to debug the PHP and trace that back to C#. This was less than idea.
Then IDE support. While I can happy without an IDE, most people can hardly function.
Trying to educate people on it was (a) marketing fail [web devs hate static typing], and (b) too hard for people to grasp (functional programming + new stuff = fail sauce).