Why do you think static languages are easier to pick up? I have had the opposite experience. In managing people who do not aspire to be software developers, but do need to write simple programs to perform basic job functions, I’ve seen much more openness to Python than to more structured alternatives. If you have suggestions that set the bar for working code lower than we can get with Python then I would love to hear them.
I think Python is perceived as easy to pick up because it's a scripting language, not because it's dynamically typed. I wish I could recommend a statically-typed scripting language that's easy to pick up, but I'm not familiar with any mainstream ones (and I'm probably too far from the newbie stage myself to be a good judge).
