Trying to get an overview of different languages and software for workflows and data pipelines--and thus 'data engineering'--I stumbled upon Common Workflow Language. I thought, well, how common is this? - Got to ask the community, and I hope DevOps is appropriate.
Does someone know how used this language is? Perhaps compared to Apache Airflow or other tools for workflows.
This question is almost certainly going to be closed "off-topic", but since I have some experience with communities using CWL in the past, I'll provide my bit.
First, a correction to your premise: CWL is a standard, which makes it different to most other workflow tools. It has several implementations. One of the main benefits is that it's platform-agnostic, making workflows highly-portable.
As you can see from their website, the user community of this standard is heavily biased towards research communities. Implementations of the standards are de-facto default toolchains in several smaller communities, mostly in the bioinformatics domain, where workflows can become quite complex.
There is a strong incentive to publish workflows so that
If you want to use Apache Airflow, there's an implementation of CWL for that
