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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By contrast in CS, practitioners (e.g. people building the Rust compiler) totally have to care about learnability. It's intrinsically tied to the adoption of their work. So we can't have education be a separate branch that does its own thing.
FWIW, CS education is definitely a burgeoning research area. There are a number of venues explicitly for CS education (SIGCSE, ICER), and although most of it is teachers reporting on their experiences, there's a growing body of more rigorous research (e.g. Andy Ko, Kathi Fisler).
