Agreed that the semantic of language-oriented is sometimes hard to disentangle from the aesthetic of "parsing and compiling". In a majority of cases you can go

Agreed that the semantic of language-oriented is sometimes hard to disentangle from the aesthetic of "parsing and compiling". In a majority of cases you can go part of the way in that direction by overlaying a FSM, stack machine or a trivial string parser onto whatever feels cluttered and obnoxious to keep track of. If you want to do the parsed exterior DSL thing today, the magic wand that probably does it the best is Raku and its souped-up grammar system. I actually am exploring that now and I think it has a good toolkit for prototyping anything resembling a textual interface.