Lambda the Ultimate

In their survey paper and their website, Leo Meyerovich and Ari Rabkin take Jared Diamond approach to explaining Programming Language adoption.

Why do some programming languages fail and others succeed? What does the answer tell us about programming language design, implementation, and principles? To help answer these and other questions, we argue for examining the sociological groundings of programming language theory: socio-PLT.
Researchers in the social sciences have studied adoption in many contexts. We show how their findings are applicable to programming language design.

There are also videos of talks available from Splash 2012 and Google Tech Talks.

See also previous discussions.