Socio-PLT: Principles for Programming Language Adoption

Ari and I are getting ready to send out our first paper on socio-PLT, the sociology of programming languages. We've been performing qualitative and quantitative analysis of language adoption, and I've been thinking about how to apply sociological principles to the design of my own languages. This paper 1) overviews some of my favorite cases that I gleaned from reviewing relevant sociology research over the past few years and 2) connects it to programming language design, both in the scientific design of existing features and the principled and creative design of new ones. Basically, it shows how understanding results from sociology can influence your approach to language design :)

I just put up a draft and would love comments. I suspect the paper may be controversial, but I would like it to be so for the right reasons :) Did we misrepresent anyone or leave out any awesome case studies? Was anything belabored and boring, or terse and tantalizingly vague? This is still in the draft state, so we have a lot to do and would appreciate feedback :)

Socio-PLT: Principles for Programming Language Adoption

Why does one programming language fail and another succeed? What does this tell us about programming language design, implementation, and principles? To help answer these and other questions, we argue for examining the sociological basis of programming language theory: socio-PLT.

This paper presents a survey for programming language adoption principles drawn from various sociological fields. For example, many programming language features provide benefits that programmers cannot directly and 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 discuss how principles and techniques drawn from social sciences such as economics, public health, and historical linguistics relate to programming languages. Finally, we examine implications of our approach, such as for the design space of language features and even the expectations of scientific research into programming languages.

Looking forward to your thoughts! (draft pdf)