Yeah it's really surprising to see how supposedly scientifically educated people are driven completely by fads and basic social needs and personal gain, and don't bother to even try to motivate decisions with anything more than "I like it" etc.
I mean, if I was participating in a computer programming class and given the same problem as an assignment, I would write a program to satisfy the requirements. If then told that I should have written a few lines of shell script instead and given a poor grade, I would be livid at the instructor.
As an aside, I was interested to know if there are LP tools for shell scripting. A cursory search turned this up:
jupyter + xon.sh kernel almost can do it too.
Well notebooks aren't exactly to explain programs but to experience with them, no weave or tangle, you can only execute them if your cells are in top-down order.
Anyhow, being able to save the experimentation fragments can lead to better documentation compared to when you experiment in a different terminal.
There is a paper [0] which documents an interesting disagreement about a project: The developers considered it a huge success but management considers it a complete disaster. Very different interpretation. Does it work?
As an example for religious behavior we could look at Powerpoint. An application which is used with practically religious fervor. However, the application is mostly misused so badly that the goal of supporting the transfer of knowledge or persuading people is not achieved. Does it work?
Without agreement about the goal/requirements, you can not determine if the resulting software works. In my experience, precise goals/requirements are often missing, so a simple question like "does it work?" is also open to interpretation.
[0] Software Developer Perceptions about Software Project Failure: A Case Study by Kurt R Linberg, 1999
Someone give this guy a medal.