Well, I'm not some prefix-fanatic, but much of the problem would not exist in the first place if we had just used some sexp style syntax for HTML, it would be m

Well, I'm not some prefix-fanatic, but much of the problem would not exist in the first place if we had just used some sexp style syntax for HTML, it would be more pleasant to edit, and faster and much easier to parse for both humans and machines to boot. Another billion dollar mistake. So I feel a bit ambivalent about attempts to lower the costs of pushing out more over complex grammars into the world. When have you last used in earnest a non-sexp/internal DSL for something like build systems that didn't engender in you an occasional urge to visit physical violence on its creators? But what I'd unambiguously like to see is easier parsing of "sane" languages and the death of perl-style regexps. Still my guess would be: 95% of trouble comes from two: html (including js, css, svg etc. unfortunately) and sql. And most of the remaining 5% from bash :) So just dealing with those three would make a big dent. Also things are not quite so bleak as you make them out to be: jsx is much saner and any established mainstream language has a conforming html5 parser these days (sadly, to do it properly you also want something that deals with the various other languages that get munged into html: css, javascript, gimped xml and here the situation is less good). SQL is thornier (and has many wildly different dialects), but unless you need dynamic queries, parameterized queries are available everywhere. In fact a 1% effort/80% of the benefits approach is to not bother with parsing at all and to just use different types for e.g. html and text (interpolate html into html as string-interpolation as text (i.e. plain strings) into html as escaped string).