[fnordpiglet]

The title is overly broad. They mean a very specific set of infrastructure automation related DSL

I tend to agree on that point. I think CDK and related approaches are much easier. I also find just writing SDK based scripts faster and more reliable. I find very little advantage in things like Terraform, despite my driving a few megacorps to adopt it. (Listen, in my defense, I couldn’t sell the idea of just scripting things, and generally they were repurposing admins who had no programming experience and had a mental block against learning a real language - but somehow a configuration file like language was ok)

However I’ve written a ton of DSLs in my life. They’re always useful, because I write them when I find it cumbersome to not. The broad statement about DSL is of course absurd. However at one point in my life I built a system that made it easy to write DSLs in a monorepo, and it was a huge mistake. Everyone wrote dsls everywhere and you constantly encountered code in some weird language that you had to reverse engineer. So, there’s a DSL entropy principle to be aware of - DSLs are useful if they are bounded. But like anything too much of a good thing ain’t