[travisgriggs]

So basically, the same thing that kept(keeps?) Visual Basic in use for so long.

My son works in polysci analytics and I see the same thing you describe. A group will pick a tool and flog all problems with it. Change rarely occurs. He was in the Stata camp at one university, the TidyVerse at MIT.

It’s very weird for me, I develop and maintain a piece of software that that has 3 OSes, and 5 languages to wrestle with as well as multiple “tool” technologies like Ansible/MQTT, etc. so I’m very much in a polyglot-best-tool-for-the-job environment. Observationally from a casual POV, I see pros/cons both ways.

[ativzzz]

I assume you are a software engineer? If so, part of our job is to use a variety of software tools, since that's our specialty. The researchers are not software developers. They learn how to use one particular tool to do their jobs, but they are not software specialists, nor do they desire to be.