[tel]

Extremely simple in principle, obscenely difficult in implementation. The real difficulty is the confounding variables. Being unable to accurately measure or predict things like level of language familiarity, programming experience, domain knowledge, or intelligence means that it'd be impossible to tie any visible effects to something as simple as language choice.

So, no, I wouldn't agree.

The best study I could think of off hand would be a randomized study of programming productivity (measured somehow) of programming naïve high schoolers. Each subject gets an incentive to learn some language over the course of X weeks and then program something. The sample size would have to be magnificent even to prove a large effect because you'd need to demonstrate control for intelligence/drive and regressing out math scores (or anything similar) would not be convincing really. At the end, you'd still not be able to talk too much about working productivity, but you might have a chance of talking about... anything at all.

Actually, this is an extraordinarily difficult study I think.

[gridspy]

Perhaps high-school or college students are poor evaluators of a language. I am not only interested in how productive you are after 1 year of using a language, I'm also interested how productive you are after 10 years using that language, or with 10 years of legacy code.