[cemerick]

See my reply to zb here, that addresses this more.

Associating general-purpose programming languages with materials science seems reasonable. Building the systems that are used to build systems, etc.

Though DSLs are the most common manifestation of declarative, often constraint-based directives, thinking about all such things as text-based is another blind assumption made by most. Far higher-bandwidth "interfaces" for defining systems will simply be necessary in so many fields that suffer under the yoke of mostly-ASCII text. Just look at mathematics and e.g. Matlab and Mathematica for a super-simple example. More broadly, data, design, and process visualization continues to be a growing "trend" (more like an inevitability, but whatever) -- why shouldn't those visualizations function as the model for the relevant domain experts (whereas they are so often simply presentational)? The sooner they make that transition, the better.