“I have seen two similar “company-specific” languages in my relatively short career” Seen them? Hell, I write them. “The commonality to any language used prim

“I have seen two similar “company-specific” languages in my relatively short career” Seen them? Hell, I write them. “The commonality to any language used primarily in a single industry is that it is dead on arrival. As soon as the original maintainer is gone the language freezes.” There’s absolutely nothing magical about a domain-specific language; it’s just one more business tool for solving a specific set of business problems. If a proven DSL fails to outlive its original creators, that’s a failure in business continuity and product lifecycle management; a common business failing across all types of business apps, not just DSLs. I’m sure we’re all familiar with the kinds of implacably progress-hostile C-grade managers and self-serving code monkeys whose only skill is in dragging everything down to their own level of incompetence and killing it with apathy. One place I worked, I built them a DSL-based system that was 10 years ahead of anything their competitors had, and yet I could not for the life of me get them to hire another dev to ensure project continuity. Unsurprisingly, when I finally quit due to burnout, they failed to replace me, effectively writing off a $200K investment and squandering who knows how many $Millions in sales opportunities without a though. (Back-of-an-envelope: this tech could cut their manual production costs by 20-80%.) But like I say, this is not a DSL-specific failing. That place also had a major enterprise CRUD webapp as their prestige product; a massive ball of mud that they were unable to maintain due to bad lifecycle management and rapid developer turnover. And that product had a team of 20 on it compared to my “team” of one, so you can imagine the amount of investment already sunk into that. Last I heard they had finally given up trying to develop it any further and were attempting to build a completely new <del>ball of mud</del> webapp to replace it; no prizes for guessing how that was working out. There’s a common theme here, which has less to do with the kind of company-specific application than to the company’s own attitudes towards it. Which is why we have TheDailyWTF.com, although the same sorts of fuckups can apply to all types of product in all types of business (and regularly do).