I'm trying to find the existing research on the topic Paul Graham discusses in this article (regarding the relative merits of programming languages in footnote 3 and surrounding text) and which EY touches on here (regarding Turing tarpits).

Basically, within the realm of Turing-complete languages, there is significant difference in how easy it is to write a program that implements specific functionality. That is, if you want to write a program that takes a bunch of integers and returns the sum of their squares, then it's possible to do it by writing in machine code, assembly, brainfsck, BASIC, C, Java, Python, Lisp, but it's much easier (and more concise, intuitive, etc) in some than others.

What's more, Graham speculates there's a ranking of the languages in which programmers too comfortable in one of the languages "don't get" the usefulness of the features in languages above it. So BASIC-addicts might not appreciate what they can do with recursion or structured programming (i.e. by abolishing go-to statements); C-addicts might not appreciate what they can do with functions as first class objects, and Python-addicts might not appreciate what they can do with Lisp macros.

I'm interested in research that formalizes (or deconstructs) this intuition and attempts to come up with a procedure for comparing programming languages in this respect. The concept is similar to "expressive power", but that's not exactly the same thing, because they can all express the same programs, but some can span a broader array of programs using fewer symbols (due to how they combine and accumulate meaning faster).

Also, the theory of Komogorov complexity holds that "when compressing data, choice of language doesn't matter except to the extent that it adds a data-independent constant equal to the length of a program that converts between the two languages"; however, this still allows that some programs (before the converter) are necessarily longer, and I've heard of results that some Turing-complete formalisms require exponential blow-up in program size over e.g. C. (This is the case with Wolfram's tiny Turing-complete language in A New Kind of Science.)

tl;dr: I want to know what research is out there (or how to find it) regarding how to rigorously evaluate programming languages regarding relative ease and brevity of writing programs, and in what senses python is better than e.g. assembler.