Fair point. But I'd say that such little languages exhibit feature creep over time. And once the two features you mention (looping + conditionals) are acquired

Fair point. But I'd say that such little languages exhibit feature creep over time. And once the two features you mention (looping + conditionals) are acquired, you've lost all the benefits you mention, since you're now turing complete. Regexes, makefiles, ant build files and even sendmail cfg files (http://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/sendmail-as-turing-machine.txt http://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/sendmail-as-turing-machine....) have grown in complexity from their first incarnations. I guess my position is: "Your language is very likely to grow over time - you might as well get the basics from a well designed language with a good toolset rather than design+implement it yourself". Note also the other way people attack this problem (lack of features in the little language) is to write "config file generators". i.e. programs in a general purpose lang which emit programs in the limited lang. That also tends to argue for the fact that such languages want to grow over time.