happy 2021, all and sundry. i should mention something else, in case it makes something click for someone. obviously, i'm not initializing things right, but that's a weak part in my knowledge, so i'm not sure what.
> i find that my shell source blocks are *not* being executed unless i > use (custom-set-variables), rather than (setq) or (let), to initialize > 'org-babel-load-languages. to wit... if i run "-Q", i see the same behavior, doing [C-c C-e h h]. *but*, if i first do [C-h f] (describe-function) on org-html-export-to-html, it works. so, presumably both (custom-set-variables) and (describe-function) are doing some sort of initialization. okay, if any body has any clue, i'd be very curious to know. cheers, Greg