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.
