New research paper looks into an interesting question: Why do some programming languages fail and others succeed?

Researchers in the social sciences have studied adoption in many contexts. We show how their findings are applicable to programming language design. For example, many programming language features provide benefits that programmers cannot directly or immediately observe and therefore may not find compelling. From clean water to safe sex, the health community has long examined how to surmount similar observability barriers. We use such results from outside of programming language theory to frame a research agenda that should help us understand the social foundations of languages.