Hi Ben, Interesting find. 2018-06-08 14:29 GMT+02:00 Ben Coman <btc@openinworld.com>:
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.
This is interesting, and they also insist in the paper that developpers do not care that much about the semantics of what they use...
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.
And have librairies that are really usefull... A possible strategy then would be a stable, clean core, and librairies that really make a difference.
Table 7 makes and interesting assertion that static types are more important for readability than preventing bugs.
This one is in line with Dan Luu meta-study that static typing catches at best a small proportion of bugs. Note that this is used in Smalltalk, when you write anInteger, aString : you're using a form of typing for documentation. By the way, I wrote for fun a small metalink-based run-time type-checker using method argument names. To be used when running unit tests :) Regards, Thierry
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.