DSLs ("microlanguages", at the time) were a big idea in the late 80s - by being expressive in ways closer to the problem, they could leave out irrelevant things

DSLs ("microlanguages", at the time) were a big idea in the late 80s - by being expressive in ways closer to the problem, they could leave out irrelevant things and the bugs they lead to. (Do you really want to have to explicitly call malloc() in your build tools? and does gdb really feel like the right tool for debugging one?)