[kazinator]

There is no such thing as a software shop with no local DSLs, in any language. All the in-house abstractions constitute DSLs.

Without syntactic abstraction (function and data only), things are worse, because those abstractions have to be coordinated together into proper usage scenarios, and those are written by hand in multiple places. So you're looking at eye-glazing repetitions.

Oh, and just because a language doesn't have macros doesn't mean you won't see any syntax-level DSL. You may find textual code generation in a project in any language. C++, Go, Java, you name it.

Understanding a large amount of unfamiliar code is a challenge no matter how it is organized. Whether it uses syntactic abstraction is a minor factor, and it is not an iron clad truth one way or the other whether that helps or hurts. If you can learn a complex API where you have to take several kinds of objects through a multi-step workflow, you can probably learn a syntactic construct that does it for you; especially if it is documented and has test cases.

You will never hire anyone who is experienced in the vocabulary of your code base, unless it was someone who was previously laid off.