[fulafel]

I think the current research on learnability doesn't come out quite this way. People are quite ok with declarative formulas, consider eg the popularity of spreadsheet programs among non-programmers. But people who learned imperative programming first need mental work to switch.

There are lots of things that were tried and retried for decades before they caught on, which are now standard. For example look at the 90s when Java and Python came around - GC and memory safety were radical ideas for the industry where C/C++ were standard, even though they had been around in various languages for decades.