It's a relief to find out this language is dynamically typed. That way I don't have to think about it.
We wanted to make the idea of a programming world as an OS manifest, so Slate images and object networks are like a file system image. The most straightforward way for us to get into that was dynamic with optional typing.
The idea at some point was to have staged meta-programming (like we did to build the VM out of Slate) that was typed, so that the static existed within the dynamic but in a more obvious way than "sure, my Haskell universe exists on a nasty filesystem".
We tried.
Obviously not ideal, but we leaned in the direction we hoped others would see. I don't think enough people saw what we were doing beyond the front page news blurbs. Slate has a lot of good code in it.