I'm going to read some of this thesis. If this piques your interest, Andreas Stefik has a fascinating Strange Loop talk (~40 minutes) where he talks about 1) th

I'm going to read some of this thesis. If this piques your interest, Andreas Stefik has a fascinating Strange Loop talk (~40 minutes) where he talks about 1) the history of evidence-based endeavors 2) the curious lack of evidence-based programming language design 3) a programming language informed by evidence, quorum. It's herehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEFrE6cgVNY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEFrE6cgVNY Short note upon skimming this thesis: Matthias Felleisen, of How to Design Programs and the Little Schemer series, is a reviewer. An awesome paragraph from the introduction: The genesis of this dissertation is a question I asked myself over a decade ago. How can I, as an aspiring programming language designer, improve upon existing languages instead of simply making another variation of a well understood theme? The well established research paradigm in language design would have me identify a deficiency in the expressiveness of some class of languages and then propose an alteration of these languages which arguably removes the defi- ciency. However, there already is several decades’ worth of such contributions, suggesting two much more pressing questions. How does one compare design alternatives that are present in the literature? And the question I focus on in this dissertation: How does one use the existing literature to aid in language design? I cannot overemphasize the importance of being able to compare the merits of programming languages without taking sides. Philip Wadler's Why Calculating is Better than Scheming ( http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/wadler87.pdf http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/wadler87.p... ) is wonderful. The problem appears when I tell you, "It'll make a Haskeller out of ya." Switching teams is an unscientific way to think about it. Evidence keeps us sober. Like another commenter said the point of evidence is improvement and change. To extend that, by contrast the point of team-behavior is improvement mixed with identity-formation and group-cohesion, which often interfere with improvement and change.