Coming from Scala (and Akka), I recently began looking at other languages that were designed with distributed computing in mind, namely Erlang (and a tiny bit of Oz and Bloom). Both Erlang and Oz are dynamically typed, and if I remember correctly (will try to find link) people have tried to add types to Erlang and managed to type a good portion of it, but could not successfully coerce the system to make it fit the last bit?
Oz, while a research language, is certainly interesting to me, but that is dynamically typed as well.
Bloom's current implementation is in Ruby, and is consequently dynamically typed.
To my knowledge, Scala (and I suppose Haskell, though I believe that was built initially more as an exploration into pure lazy functional languages as opposed to distributed systems) is the only language that is statically typed and offer language-level abstractions (for lack of a better term) in distributed computing.
I am just wondering if there are inherent advantages of dynamic typing over static typing, specifically in the context of providing language level abstractions for programming distributed systems.
Not really. For example, the same group that invented Oz later did some work on Alice ML, a project whose mission statement was to rethink Oz as a typed, functional language. And although it remained a research project, I'd argue that it was enough proof of concept to demonstrate that the same basic functionality can be supported in such a setting.
(Full disclosure: I was a PhD student in that group at the time, and the type system of Alice ML was my thesis.)
Edit: The problem with adding types to Erlang isn't distribution, it simply is an instance of the general problem that adding types to a language after the fact never works out well. On the other hand, there still is Dialyzer for Erlang.
Edit 2: I should mention that there were other interesting research projects for typed distributed languages, e.g. Acute, which had a scope similar to Alice ML, or ML5, which used modal types to enable stronger checking of mobility characteristics. But they have only survived in the form of papers.