[auxfil]

This is a “deepity”. We already do this. We constantly do this in programming:

“The idea is that as you start to find patterns in your application, you can encode them in a little language—this language would then allow you to express these patterns in a more compact manner than would be possible by other means of abstraction. Not only could this buck the trend of ever-growing applications, it would actually allow the code base to shrink during the course of development!”

Functions, frameworks, little languages. It’s all abstractions on top of abstractions. You are shifting the knowledge of the abstraction for the more fundamental knowledge underneath that does the actual work.

You end up just sweeping the codebase growth under some other layer’s rug and blissfully forget about the woes of future maintainers. The code is still there, abstracted and exposed by the “little language”. Hiding this behind a cute moniker doesn’t seduce.

This isn’t the future of programming. This is already programming.

[Spark_Ed]

Maybe the author is trying to predict that there will be boom in DSLs like there was for JS frameworks? Funnily enough, I'm just wrapping up a DSL for our in-house web component engine that creates an abstract data layer all components share. The pattern was easy enough that I'll probably build more DSLs like it when an API isn't flexible enough

[valenterry]

The better the programming language, the less need for a custom language. You can then create the DSL inside of the host language. This requires flexibile syntax to some degree and a fairly advanced typesystem if it should be statically typed - hence not too many languages are a good choice here.

[giraffe_lady]

I don't think there's anything in that comment to indicate that they didn't do it that way. There's a robust discussion about this elsewhere, but people making embedded DSLs is basically routine. They just don't always call them that or have awareness that what they're doing fits that description. But almost all of those will be written in the "host language" of just whatever the containing system happens to be written in.

Some languages are particularly suited for this but other than racket and ruby it seems mostly accidental/incidental to their design.

[valenterry]

Right - but to me it sounded more as if there would be specific new languages being invented, since the author gave Lua and Dhall as examples.