[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).