[boohooimsad]

I'll play. CWL was designed for bioinformatics research first. We're using CWL for bioinformatics analysis, because as the "scientific workflow | data pipeline" grows (beyond 5-10 tools), bundling the execution and logical analysis together becomes difficult. If we can let researchers write just their analysis (which tools to run and what their dependencies are), and abstract the execution environment we can create more structured analysis that's portable and publishable, and also often quicker to run.

Bioinformatics software isn't perfectly written software, there are a number of weird behaviour that a simple unix pipe doesn't solve. There are engines that support CWL, and other existing engines have been adding CWL support.

I'm not saying that there aren't other frameworks out there for doing analysis, or that this is the best way but this is an option that IS working for researchers.

Edit: workflow -> scientific workflow | data pipeline