I think which one is more maintainable also depends on the makeup of your team. If it's primarily a bunch of Java/C# programmers, than the former style is best.

I think which one is more maintainable also depends on the makeup of your team. If it's primarily a bunch of Java/C# programmers, than the former style is best. On the other hand, if you have a set of string programmers and a bunch of domain experts, the DSL style is not only faster but wait to maintain. Your core programmers should be good enough to deal with both the host language and the DSL with no difficulty, and your domain experts need only to understand the DSL, which could be easy since it's already optimized for their domains. I've certainly read about this approach being very successful with Haskell at a bank. More generally, core logic should be easier to understand and maintain with a DSL. Perhaps this makes it harder to extend or repurpose the DSL without a good understanding of the host language and the codebase, but it makes working within the domain much easier, and makes it simpler to verify that the code is correct in regards to the specific domain. Also, Javascript is not the best language for embedding DSLs; while it's not horrible, the syntax is inflexible and the semantics are somewhat limiting.