Thanks for the detailed explanation. I get the appeal of this then, I just don't think it's worth. Whatever you do will produce some static proto in the end that can be diffed at least. General lang benefits from everyone understanding it and all the standard debug/test methods applying, which I'd much rather have than easier static analysis of the dynamic part. And yeah I was uninformed on Google's config langs, but so was my entire team for 7 years, all cargo-culting.

You're saying the general lang approach led to Piccolo, but that was still a DSL. It looked sorta like Python but it's not, you don't even call functions the normal way, and tons of magic stuff is happening, so just GCL/BCL except worse for the reasons you said. But they must've had a reason to try it. Seeing them continue changing around and making new languages says it's not just me, nothing is working well enough to stick. SREs weren't just arguing about which is better, they were asserting X is deprecated in favor of Y.

TF has seemingly stuck outside. I'm still not a fan of that being a DSL, but at least it's one tons of people use and now Claude can easily handle.