Good point, and I'm not a big fan of DSL. I think most of the time, we should make a better API. But for regexes, it has been a success: they are rarely used,

Good point, and I'm not a big fan of DSL. I think most of the time, we should make a better API. But for regexes, it has been a success: they are rarely used, but when they are, you are glad you have them. In fact you probably need to do both: re in Python is a library. A library that implements the regex DSL. Maybe there is a way to create an API around numpy that translates a J/K/APL like DSL into numpy operations. Just like regexes, this is not something you want to use often. But I assume that, just like I don't want to describe a whole parser when I just need to match/split/extract text, people doing array processing probably don't want to describe every single steps for very common operations in some cases.