[eternalban]

I only have only one experience to share. Back in mid 90s, was tasked with developing a webserver that provided targeted advertising. A requirement was providing the marketing team an accessible mechanism for defining rules. Basic stuff like encoding a marketing/ad-sale team rule such as "show ad of truck if user is male, at some age group". A little scripting language was developed, nothing fancier than conditional branching was involved on the surface. And the user base immediately got it and started using it, because it was a "little language".

Sometimes a DSL is really the right solution.

[psychoslave]

Well, go with a language that makes DSL a peace of cake, like Ruby.

[adql]

This could've probably just been Lua tho ?

[williamcotton]

Most of what Lua offers will not be a requirement for what the ad ops team needs to create and maintain campaigns and there will be specific requirements that are not easily expressed in Lua.

[eternalban]

modulo binding to (extant) c++ runtime, yep.

But this was in spring of '95. Ruby released later in December of that year. Lua was first publicly released in '94. I learned about the existence of these two a few years later (Lua first, and then Ruby via RoR).

mea culpa: there was no reddit or github or HN back in '95. Usenet would have been helpful but it wasn't on my radar in those days. I was just 2 years out of architecture grad school, and not exposed to the CS communities in my student years.

[adql]

Yeah back then it was much less to choose from. TCL i guess but honestly I was never a fan.

I did wrote a firewall DSL in Perl right around that time but that was just a toy of a teenager.