Decades counts as lately. Are there any other programming religions?
Haskell, Julia, Rust, Lisp, and Forth are 'esoteric' enough to create an in-crowd, who are quite often deluded by imagined miraculous solutions to people's problems.
Please repeat after Fred Brooks: there ain't no silver bullet.
To a certain extent this goes on outside programming languages per se: OOP, Gang of Four, Agile match the pattern as well.
Feel APL similar in-crowd member too, though perhaps even more niche
Yup. Also HolyC (literally a religious undertaking), but the crowd had only one person, and he is no longer with us.
Went to a better place, one hopes. Maybe one where he is appreciated, and not considered mad.
The "in-crowd" vibe is very different from religion. We admire a language for its strengths, but worship it for its faults. APL is beginning to shade into theological territory.