> if every application has it's own language and syntax that is a huge barrier for others coming to work on it
And this is quite obviously not true. A well designed (note the emphasis!) DSL makes any app/problem domain/library/whatever much more accessible than any kind of a "general purpose" language can. Simply because DSL does not obscure the essence of the problem.
> Beyond that you come to issues of code
Code reuse with DSLs is way beyond anything the inferior languages can achieve. I witnessed cases where 30+ years old DSLs got revived by reimplementing them from scratch, immediately making an entire (huge) code base available on a new platform, with new tools and bells and whistles.
> and skill reuse.
One should never care about those pitiful "language" skills. They're worthless.
No, it's more of a No True Scotsman. People have written DSLs that are unreadable, but those DSLs weren't Well Designed(TM). So their failures don't count against DSLs, because only well designed DSLs count.
I think empirical evidence is that DSLs are easy to make not readable, especially as they evolve. Then again, that's true of almost everything, including assembly language programming, structured programming, object oriented programming, and functional programming (did I miss anything?).
The article is plain wrong.
> if every application has it's own language and syntax that is a huge barrier for others coming to work on it
And this is quite obviously not true. A well designed (note the emphasis!) DSL makes any app/problem domain/library/whatever much more accessible than any kind of a "general purpose" language can. Simply because DSL does not obscure the essence of the problem.
> Beyond that you come to issues of code
Code reuse with DSLs is way beyond anything the inferior languages can achieve. I witnessed cases where 30+ years old DSLs got revived by reimplementing them from scratch, immediately making an entire (huge) code base available on a new platform, with new tools and bells and whistles.
> and skill reuse.
One should never care about those pitiful "language" skills. They're worthless.