Dynamic languages have changed the landscape and their only downfall is speed compared to native languages like C and C++.  C/C++ have had a bit of a resurgence with embedded devices and such sucesses as the iphone and ipod touch.  To get the most out of these devices native is the way to go.  Both iPhone SDK and Android NDK are native based.  The best games and graphically intensive applications need hardware rendering and the fastest way to get there is native. Larger companies like Google need to take advantage of speed to market and fast execution.  The outcome of that appears to be the Go language.

Native applications are more complex to manage, so lots of work like Unladen Swallow getting Python running with LLVM, PyPy and others to make CPython faster.  Google has supported Unladen Swallow.  But a company the size of Google has massive scalability problems to solve, and maybe they are looking to go more native?  The go language is now available from Google and it is deemed “Python meets C++”.  Where Apple has Objective-C (which is actually as old as C++) which is a bit more message and event driven, Google has Go which is much like Python and other dynamic languages but much closer to C++ speeds.

We will learn more about Go over time but it looks like it is taking the best of both the dynamic and native/static worlds in programming languages which is a great evolution in technology.