I bumped into a paper "Empirical Analysis of Programming Language Adoption"

that I thought might be of interest to others since we'd like to increase Pharo's mindshare. (http://sns.cs.princeton.edu/docs/asr-oopsla13.pdf)

TLDR; my top three take outs were...

Figure 5 indicates that simple syntax and languages features don't attract new users, and of the things we can control the most important are...
performance, portability and development speed.

Figure 12��suggests a strategy to promote useful libraries rather than language features.�� I guess that might best take take the form blogs showing the use of libraries.

Table 7 makes and interesting assertion that static types are more important for readability than preventing bugs.

cheers -ben

P.S. Then I bumped into "Toward Semantic Foundations for Program Editors"

(https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.08694.pdf)

which was over my head but I guess it might be interesting to people working in UI area.��