The article isn't too controversial, although it's a bit idealistic about DSLs -- In a previous job I've worked in an environment with a DSL (incidentally, it w

The article isn't too controversial, although it's a bit idealistic about DSLs -- In a previous job I've worked in an environment with a DSL (incidentally, it was wrapped in a really restrictive GUI that was the first to go) that was ok in the trivial case but was greatly restricted by the language designer's lack of forethought. For example, it was not possible to operate on certain things using the inbuilt looping construct. We ended up replacing the DSL with Perl for this and performance reasons. Perhaps slightly off topic but vastly more interesting to me is the root of the trouble with GUIs. We saw that GUI demo in the 60s, nothing happened for 20 years until PARC and we've spent the next 30 years moving the close button around and deciding how to word the Save File dialog box. Where is the innovation here? Why are virtually all languages implemented in 7-bit ASCII and a monospaced font? Why is programmatic control or recording of GUI actions almost always an afterthought? In a former employment life I saw mockups of brainstorming effort to envision the future of the command line. The team's efforts mostly looked like trivial window decoration changes -- the terminal window itself was still ASCII (utf8 or whatever probably), 80x25, and monochrome. Why? Much as mankind's hand has spread invasive plant species to virtually all soil on the earth, rendering it largely similar on most continents, the curse of POSIX is that it has choked out a lot of computing/OS design. Mindless (or unambitious) mimicry of the Mac/Windows in the GUI world has given us beige on that once beautiful frontier as well. I guess it's not a bad place to be, but you wonder how else it might have turned out.