Yes - there is definitely a hierarchy of difficulty: user code, library, macros, full syntax extension. The trouble is that designing new languages takes a lot

Yes - there is definitely a hierarchy of difficulty: user code, library, macros, full syntax extension. The trouble is that designing new languages takes a lot of _taste_ and experience. We don't know the full domain, so DSLs tend to have bits added to them as knowledge of the domain grows - and that's the scary point in language evolution. So, despite these things being tremendous fun, I tend more towards correctness and clarity at the expense of sheer expressiveness. (An example of ad-hoc language design is CMake, which makes my eyes bleed. Kitware should have used an existing language - even tcl would have been better.)