cognitive psychology. PhD 
I train Rust since 4 years (Meetup, Hack & Learn and actually as a paid trainer for 3 years now) and I _hate_ it when people bring up "learnability" in language RFCs. Most of the time, it's a bit of anecdata, scrapped together.
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We tried something slightly structural in this direction and it was useful I think. https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.01001
The core challenge is understanding learnability in a rigorous but efficient way. Most people don’t have time for user studies, teaching courses, following students, etc so we rely on our experiences and intuitions. Surveys at best.
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A symptom of this in academia is the propensity to use lines of code as a usability metric. “Examples in our system are avg 50% less LOC than leading competitor. Therefore we are more usable.”
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I think important research can be done here. Identifying lightweight methodologies that have higher correlations with usability (whatever that really means...) and seeing if they can meaningfully influence system design in practice.
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(Just downloaded the paper for flight reading) I'm slightly puzzled from that statement. Most sciences have a teaching/education branch, which CS is notably missing. I honestly think we need more rigorous studies to improve the state of our intuitions.
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One factor here is the lack of separation between practitioners and educators. The people at CERN probably aren't thinking about learnability when they built LHC, but there's a separate community thinking about how to most effectively teach physics. They work separately.
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