[chipsy]

Chuck Moore has said almost exactly this about Forth. I think this is a property shared between all the low-syntax, high-power languages, including Forth, Lisp, Smalltalk, Lua, etc. But the downside is that there is an inevitable tooling issue where you can achieve concise constructions that read well, but the language and development environment don't "really know" what's going on in the problem domain's microlanguage and can't enforce the concepts or help to debug in the ways a specialized language implementation can. And so as your needs get bigger and you want to make a polished, easy-to-use package, you inevitably drift from libraries, to macros and meta-programming, to data files, and then towards the full parser/compiler/interpreter gamut.