For the amount people care about it, there isn’t much evidence in either direction. And most studies that do exist are limited to small programs typically written by novices. Yale’s Singapore campus are going to be running two instances of the same course in parallel soon, one in python and one in ocaml. Perhaps that will provide a datapoint about learning the languages but maybe there will just be a lot of selection bias or library or environment or teacher differences. And how easy it is to learn a language probably isn’t the main datapoint to care about anyway.
