Yes I believe you are on to something here.

> Good luck with your research, but how are you going to discern the difference between high and low level languages?

Thanks! I'll share my findings on HN when I get them, maybe they'll make it to the front page who knows. My research is focused on what features or design elements exactly made Matlab so much more understandable than C++. I think it comes down to

- single data structure that you can put anything in. The table is a very good general structure. Excel echoes this, as people find excel very approachable.

- single numerical type. Everything is basically a float, so you don't have to think about all the numerical nuance involved in choosing between ints, floats, doubles, longs etc.

- 1 indexing, because that's always such a sticking point to brand new programmers

- interactive IDE that allows you to see all of the variables and click into them to see their values. The Matlab REPL isn't great but it's a huge step up from the write-compile-run loop in C++.

Honestly I'd like to try Lua. It has a lot of these properties, so I think it could maybe have good success. But you're right, I'd like to rerun the experiment with all of the languages you listed.