Lots of people across broad spectrums do this all the time. It's uncomfortable to publicly admit you don't know something; a lot of people, especially otherwise

Lots of people across broad spectrums do this all the time. It's uncomfortable to publicly admit you don't know something; a lot of people, especially otherwise smart people, try to apply their expertise in one area to another area they have no specialized knowledge in. Programmers as a group are maybe a little bit worse about this than most other groups (except maybe physicists), because they view themselves as "systems people", and "everything is a system", therefore similar rules apply everywhere: software is buggy by nature, so scientific research must suffer from similar error rates, for example.