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Comment by golergka | Hacker News Reader

> except now in a much crappier language

This is one principal point where I disagree with this post. A proper DSL is a much better language than whatever the core is build in; for example, C++ may be the perfect language to write the game engine, but LUA is usually a much better choice for game designers to write the level-specific and quest-specific logic.

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The argument one's making is that at some point, the complexity of business rules extends the complexity of the DSL you wrote, at which point people tend to evolve DSLs until they become a crappy general-purpose programming language.

For a good example of that, see the evolution of template engines in web development. They quickly accrued conditionals, function definition, recursion, and at some point they just turned into a crappier version of PHP. The latter is doubly ironic when you see people using template engines in PHP, as if not noticing that PHP is already a better templating language.

Good point! I thought about templating also when I read this article. I also like how a similar perspective inspired Tero to develop RiotJS, he is even quoting the Facebook team: "Templates separate technologies, not concerns" - http://riotjs.com

In my eyes, PHP was a template engine to begin with, so it indeed doesn't make sense. But I doubt that your business logic would require to include manual memory management or bitwise operations, for example.

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