[foobiekr]

The problem is, as appealing as building a DSL (in or out of another language) is to engineers, turning your source base into a pool of pidgins where there are no native speakers and all new hires or people moving between parts of the code base will need to learn a new language is not an advantage. It is completely unnecessary friction.

We all get this when we encounter jargon-crazy groups, but somehow forget it when it comes to code.

[astrobe_]

OTOH an application does have its own language. Someone said "When you devised an application you wrote a hundred words [(functions)] or so that discussed the application and you used those hundred words to write a one line definition to solve the application. It is not easy to find those hundred words, but they exist, they always exist."

I think for non-trivial programs it is not avoidable to have to learn first the terminology of the domain and the terminology of the program (how things were named when it was not dictated by the language of the domain).

However, hacking the syntax of the language is a whole different story, and perhaps that's where DSL-ready languages go wrong. That's ironic coming from someone that just quoted the author of a language that has no syntax to speak of, and macro powers that are sometimes compared to Lisp macros. Just use them wisely, one would say, but that kind of wisdom comes with experience.