[peterhunt]

I am against constrained DSLs in general unless it buys you something. In the general case, with a DSL you sacrifice expressivity in order to gain security guarantees or improved performance. In this case you are sacrificing expressivity to gain performance but I don't think the performance gains are meaningful enough to be worth sacrificing all of that expressivity. So to answer your question, I am generally opposed to constrained templating DSLs for web frontend applications overall.

[christophilus]

I’d say DSLs in general are really annoying. They’re almost never as well designed as a mainstream language, their tooling is usually worse, and good luck if you ever need to do something that isn’t well supported by them.

These problems are surmountable, but man, I’ve used and created some crappy DSLs in my time. If you’re wondering, “Should I create a a DSL for this?” Default to “No” unless the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of it.

[markmark]

I couldn't agree more. Every time I have to do a for-each loop in some templating language instead of just using a normal programming language I want to shoot it into the sun. Templated yaml is my current pain point. Why not build data structures in a normal programming language and then write the result to yaml. It feels like a lesson we learnt after templated XML 20 years ago that we keep forgetting.