It may be a bit more zoomed out than what you're looking for if you're specifically looking at philosophical treatments of the practice of engineering, but Andrew Feenberg's "Questioning Technology" is excellent introduction to the philosophy of technology, particularly exploring the interplay between technological constraint and political/economic/social drivers of its development.
"Philosophy of Technology" in general is a pretty rich field with a long history, and you might find more references in it than in engineering specifically.
`django-environ` makes a fairly simple effort[1] to strip starting/ending quotes off of literals. This will set the value of MY_VAR to the string `foo` (with doublequotes removed) in django-environ:
MY_VAR="foo"
Docker does not do any quote parsing. For this same env file, it will set the value of the variable to `"foo"` (retaining the doublequotes in the value).
Bash, of course, requires quotes if the variable contains any special bash characters (for example, literal JSON with curly brackets), but its quote handling is much more complex. django-environ doesn't interpret bash code; it just does simple quote chomping.
There's no reliable .env syntax you can use that works in all 3 of django-environ, Docker, and bash; and any variable that should start and end with quotes that are not stripped off can't be expressed in a way that both Docker and django-environ will read in the same way.
This may seem like a nit-picking edge case, but it's indicative of the design philosophy in django-environ of trying to be "helpful", but in ways which lead to subtle confusion. The way it guesses the path to your `.env` file is another example.
While we started off using `django-environ` to help manage environment-based/12-factor settings, we've moved away from it in favor of django-classy-settings.
The biggest knock against django-environ is that it does not treat the `.env` syntax the same as Docker or bash -- meaning that the same environment file can't be reliably used to provide variables for both the container and Django.
django-classy-settings has been a joy to use, and its code is really simple and readable (~150 lines).
"Philosophy of Technology" in general is a pretty rich field with a long history, and you might find more references in it than in engineering specifically.