[johnbender]

> Pallet places much more emphasis on using recipes (or crates as we call them) as library functions, in cleanly versioned packages (jar files)

This is something that I can certainly appreciate and something that I've discussed at length with colleagues. In general dsl's require that you perform some impressive acrobatics when you want to extend them and this becomes particularly frustrating when you consider that a programming language like Ruby already has many well thought out facilities for said extensions (mostly directed at chef here). I'd like to think there's some happy middleground between a dsl that's easy to dive into and making use of the language constructs we've come to depend on everywhere else.