[tremon]

Over the years my opinion has grown in the same direction, but with a slightly different slant: domain-specific configuration syntaxes are a waste of time, and domain-specific processing instructions masquerading as a Turing-complete language are always inferior to a real programming language.

If you want to represent a data structure, PLEASE pretty please just use an existing data format (json, yaml, toml, xml). Those structures can be parsed and validated by generic tools, and you won't need to write your own domain-specific parsers and syntax highlighters to deal with a problem of your own making.

And if you want to allow for runtime evaluation of constructs, PLEASE pretty please just use a programming language that has friendly syntax (lua or python comes to mind). Don't get cute and try to invent your own language, just provide a good API on top.