Well as with anything, DSLs are subject to the rules of good design. A really well-designed DSL (such as SQL) takes on a life of its own and becomes incredibly

Well as with anything, DSLs are subject to the rules of good design. A really well-designed DSL (such as SQL) takes on a life of its own and becomes incredibly ubiquitous and useful to know in its own right. Many other DSLs are totally unknown, not worth learning, and serve as barriers to code understanding. I don’t know of too many people who would advocate replacing SQL with hand-written C manipulating B-trees and hash tables. Similarly, it’s pretty rare that you want to hand-roll a parser in C over using a parser generator DSL or even something like regex.