The authors point out that the PL community values formal methods and hard implementation, but not human factor studies and alternative programming approached like spreadsheets. I'm not from the PL community, but my first instinct was other communities such as social science, software engineering, HCI can do those things. PL has to be about building languages.

However, the example that drove the problem home for me was socioPLT. If award winning work on why program languages succeed is not highly successful, then maybe the community should indeed look into incorporating more research approaches.

The points the authors make about lack of community engagement for non-mainstream problems, lack of female creators in books about PLs, and gatekeeping of the term programming language are also convincing.