[zelphirkalt]

But your ORM example could be considered a DSL in itself, so it doesn't really work that well. ORMs can be implemented in various ways too, as a syntactically looking different DSL or as something like objects and method calls or whatever the language already provides.

Regexes can be abstracted from exactly by making a more readable DSL.

Config files and the stuff accepted therein are small languages as well.

What are the alternatives to making little languages?