There's one key I've seen to DSLs that really work: scope your DSL with iron.

You should be able to clearly say 'This DSL can do X. It cannot do Y.'

(Then, if Y sometimes needs to get done, provide an escape hatch integration point to C et al.: but don't ever expand your DSL beyond the domain!)

You can see this with how VB became much more monstrous and complex as soon as they tried to shoehorn in a multi-table paradigm.

I think later-legacy-VB (eg 6) suffers harshly from failing to properly separate primatives.

Imho (open to disagreement), one should think incredibly hard before adding primatives to a DSL. Because what that's essentially saying is "My abstraction was incomplete over the target domain, and now I'm going to hack something in." And now you have a "domain + some other stuff" language, which starts to look like a general purpose language.

SQL vs VB is an excellent example of focus.

(Although I do think VB.net added sanity back to the mix, by saying more clearly "These are VB things" and "These are .net things", and if you want to do the latter in the former, just make a library call)

I saw VB6 used by many non-programmers. It often wasn't pretty, but got the job done (helped in no small part by a rich ecosystem of COM/ActiveX components).

There are many more success non-popular stories around DSLs. Last year, in the Community event of JetBrains MPS, a bunch of big companies (Siemens, Bosch, Workday, etc.) showcased their DSLs built with MPS technology. Here are the videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=102hoaAdctk&list=PLQ176FUIyI...

That may be true in some sectors but not all. In capital markets (banks, investment funds etc) a lot of coding (via DSL or not) is done by folks who are not developers/programmers or self-declared coders. They just get it done and don’t bother calling on IT which is often counter-productive. Wether its SQL, VBA, R, Python or some some horribly-convoluted Excel worksheets, there is plenty of technical work getting done by non-developers.

Visual Basic definitely opened up programming for a lot of people that otherwise never wouldn't have written software. You will never be able to create something everyone can use (unless it can do mind reading and even then I am not sure) but tools like VB, Access and Excel have enabled a lot of people tow write software.

Notice that the GP didn't include managers at the groups he created DSLs for.

And Visual Basic (or COBOL if you want to go back) are meant for what group exactly? It does not look specialized into any domain.

COBOL is specialized for business applications by supporting records (i.e. punch cards) and decimal numbers (as opposed to the binary floating point of FORTRAN).

Visual Basic is specialized for using COM (with a high-level interface to its features), I suppose - otherwise it's definitely general-purpose.

This is exactly right