> It's easier to make a specialized language than commonly thought. Though generally the trickiest part is creating appropriate tooling for things like source m

> It's easier to make a specialized language than commonly thought. Though generally the trickiest part is creating appropriate tooling for things like source maps, debugging, etc. Right. Maintenance, documentation, training, tooling, packaging, debugging, etc., of a DSL far outstrips its development cost. When you use regular expressions to solve a problem, you have two problems. And regular expressions have (basically) well understood parsers, logic generators, and so on. When you use a DSL to solve a problem, you have N problems. Maybe that's much, much better than the alternative (query languages are particularly interesting), but people definitely shouldn't stop at "this was easy to make... what's the big deal?"