I have never investigated this, but I feel that PL pragamtics and PL-feel is relatively under researched.

I talked about this with colleagues a few years back, but we had very distinctly different feelings about what we were doing when writing C vs C#: C often feels more like writing text that will be translated to code while C# already feels like you are manipulating code. It makes no sense when I write this out but that's phemenology for ya.

This is interesting. I "feel" this in Visual Studio, as the DE is more tightly I(ntegrated). Do you still feel like this in the context of a plugin-less plain editor?

Running any study with real humans is very expensive. We can measure simple things empirically (eg reaction time), but trying to measure something such has “cognitive load” is probably impossible, and what is a usability metric? Do those already exist for PL or so they need to be invented somehow?

We (PL researchers) think about this a lot, but so far no one has come up with any good answers on how to empirically measure PL usability for an entire PL (vs chipping off small features to evaluate). At best, we can run qualitative studies with little in the way of rigor.

> I would do it if the right PhD student came along!

Quit trying to lure unsuspecting CS grads into your van!