> a language can be a home-cooked meal [...] a tool for use by a programmer [...] a pipeline that transforms a data structure from a format that the human would

> a language can be a home-cooked meal [...] a tool for use by a programmer [...] a pipeline that transforms a data structure from a format that the human would prefer to interact with into a format that a specific machine can work with. You're neglecting the second function that a language serves, which is as a communication device to communicate a program from one human being to another, and in that second function, a language is utterly useless if it lacks critical mass in terms of how many people "speak" it. This runs completely counter to the "home-cooked meal" model. You run into problems, even if you only have one human being trying to communicate the program to their future self, because there's a tendency to forget a language you don't use regularly, so you might cook up a very brilliant language to solve a problem that you have right now, but that you don't have sufficiently frequently. So you don't practice the language regularly, and then you come back 10 years later and want to change something about the program and you might find yourself in trouble.