[toadpipe]

Given that DSLs are hard, it does not follow that sticking "foundational concepts" into "components" is a better strategy than DSLs. If you write a DSL, you are standing on the shoulders of real giants. If you rely on components, you are going with the recently formed current conventional wisdom, and you are standing on the shoulders of relative peons.

Note that Fred Brooks argues for conceptual integrity, provided by a single human being, as the most important guarantee of product quality. If you use components, then you are accepting a system partitioning that has been decided many layers above you. If you design languages, then you cut out most of those layers. This gives you far more control over product quality.

Yeah, it's hard. Quality is hard. If your primary goal is anything other than quality, you will probably not produce a product with much of it. That's the real reason why there's no silver bullet.

[jerf]

"If you write a DSL, you are standing on the shoulders of real giants."

In what sense do you mean that? Serious question, not sarcastic. It seems to me that if you build a DSL you're not standing on anybody's shoulders, which seems rather a disadvantage, but I say this to show you what I'm not understanding in your point, not as a criticism, as I believe you meant something else.

[toadpipe]

You are standing on the shoulders of people who design languages, vs. standing on the shoulders of people who write libraries. Languages are much closer to the central concepts in computing, and the people who work on them have done a lot more careful and general thinking, in general, than what goes into libraries. Libraries are great to build on, but only so long as they are almost exactly what you need already, because you can't change them to any significant degree.

There's a reason why all the best languages (lisp/forth/etc) are language building languages, not library building languages. A library building language is just a DSL that you can't modify. You can write anything in it, but so what? You can write anything in Brainfuck too - that's what the term "Turing tarpit" was coined to describe.

When someone tells you what their favorite language is, you should ask what that person does. If all they do is write web apps, they probably like their language because it is a good web app DSL. Nothing wrong with that, except that it doesn't scale (webapps scale, but they do it by scaling the database, not the language).