One of the reasons that I'm excited to be going to PyCon this year is Michael Salib, an undergraduate at MIT has written Starkiller, a type inference engine for Python. Michael's web site entry is a bit out of date, but I hope that he's made a lot of progress since August. The plan is to release Starkiller under the GPL, which means that others ought to be able to hack on it, modulo conflicts with the license.

So maybe Jon and Anders will get what they want.

Also worth checking out is James Strachan's Groovy, which allows type declarations to be omitted. More on this in the coming weeks, as I get ready to do a Groovy talk for SeaJUG.