I've found that if you dig for original sources of many beliefs in computer science and the tech industry you find some total BS "paper" that was really just a sales tactic for the author's company. Today it's DataPro overestimating COBOL transactions: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/21/01/30/2128205/are-we-overestimating-the-number-of-cobol-transactions-each-day

Reading this it looks like they took the amount of COBOL in the world in 1997, then extrapolated that to every human and computer on earth, and that's where the numbers come from, this number is the constantly quoted and never updated or questioned.

Another totally BS "paper" that has inflicted the industry with zealotry for decades is the John Backus "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?" paper. If you actually read it there isn't a single lick of logic and is all propaganda:

https://www.thocp.net/biographies/papers/backus_turingaward_lecture.pdf

Going even farther back there's Dijkstra Go To Statement Considered Harmful "paper":

https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/Dijkstra68.pdf

Again, it's just propaganda with not a single bit of proof at all, but it's got lots of "proofy mathy" language in it. There's an interesting implication from this:

Because of this paper a great many programming languages removed goto or anything that could be an unconditional jump.

Turns out if you don't have goto it is incredibly difficult to efficiently transpile to that language. This became a language lockin tactic.

As with all of these BS fake-logic propaganda papers and bad "analyses" they become held as truths and then programmers--who are incredibly prone to adopt authoritarian beliefs--turn them into absolutist proclamations rather than the opinion pieces they actually are.

Also, I believe these papers spawned the peculiar rhetorical style many programmers have that I call "Passive Abusive Logicese". Read this statements again:

"Goto Considered Harmful"

"Considered" is passive, it's not aggressive in your face, it's a high gentlemanly word.

"Harmful" though is *not* gentlemanly at all. It's abusive, attacking the entire concept of Goto, but it's only "considered" harmful. It isn't *really* harmful, no good sir, I am not being so bold as to declare myself so arrogant as to explicitly state it *is* harmful.

The entire paper is full of this passive abusive verbiage. "For a number of years I have been familiar with"...is passive abusive for "Programmers suck today!"

"More recently I discovered why the uses of go to"... discovered? See, it's not his opinion, it's a "discovery"!

The logicese of the Passive Abusive Logicese style almost always throws in seemingly random "math words and symbols" to add credibility. None of this is real math. It's not a proof. None of these arrows and ... are necessary, they are just lipstick on a Passive Abusive pig.