> I don’t always see this as the case and this might be a very fruitful area for research. What I mean is, much like how we have tools like bison, antlr, and the k framework, I could easily see this notion extending to language servers, etc.
Yeah, I could see this happening, to a point. I'm not convinced it will happen, because what would be the impetus?
> I remember a time when CSS and HTML had yet to be consumed by a general purpose language and the onboarding for new web designers was significantly easier.
So do I. I had a friend whose dad wanted to start building web pages for a living, right at the moment when that job was starting to vanish.
At least two factors were involved in that shift:
1. More and more companies wanted web applications, not simple web sites. A functional web app requires engineering effort or it falls apart, whereas a simple web site just requires making things look right. Once these companies had engineers for a web app, it was simpler just to pay them to build out a marketing page than to hire that out (even if hiring it out would have been cheaper).
2. WordPress was becoming more and more approachable, and others like SquareSpace stepped in to make it even easier for a non-technical person to build a website. Companies that didn't need engineers for an app realized that they could do a good enough job for their needs by just using these tools in-house.
I suspect this is the fate of any little language that successfully eliminates the need for engineers: if we can take a piece of a domain and describe it in a DSL that is streamlined enough for no-effort onboarding, it won't take very long for the DSL to be made redundant by GUI tools that are even easier to use.
At that point, the DSL either goes away entirely or it morphs into something bigger to meet more complex needs (as HTML/CSS/JS did).
(This doesn't apply to DSLs like Regex and SQL that are designed for use by engineers, but then we're back to the question of whether an external DSL is pulling its weight relative to an equivalent library.)