I was having a discussion on a Discord server about what syntax would be the best for beginners to understand in a programming language someone was designing for a game they were making, and I remembered that I had read about an evidence-based programming language which was designed specifically to being easy to understand. I vaguely remembered that it had some studies which looked at the error rate, or something like that, of using different writing styles like braces versus whitespace.

It took me a while to look it up, but it’s called Quorum: https://quorumlanguage.com/

It describes itself as “The World’s First Evidence Oriented Programming Language”, and the studies I remember reading about are found here. They used included studies which:

• Show a positive impact of statically typed languages over dynamically typed ones.
• Show that STM can reduce programming time and prevent syncronization bugs
• Show that notation has a large impact on novices
• Show that inheritance depth is not strongly correlated with maintenance effort