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Sure I know about DSLs in Lisps and such, but I don't think LISP DSLs are quite on the level of SQL. If everyone creates their own DSLs I don't think it has the same impact.

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> but I don't think LISP DSLs are quite on the level of SQL

I'm curious what you mean by this. Is your definition of a DSL based on the language's syntax, or on the language's paradigm? Clojure's core.logic [1] provides logic programming, as apposed to functional programming, but maintains the syntax of a LISP.

[1] https://github.com/clojure/core.logic/wiki/Examples

I think the reason LISP remains obscure is that syntax is important and LISP syntax is an unpleasant way to express a lot of domain languages.

(I work with embedded DSLs quite a lot, but in Scala, where infix and postfix operators are easy)

Syntax is nothing. It's trivial to build any kind of syntax on top of Lisp, with arbitrary complex DSLs. See an example here: https://github.com/combinatorylogic/mbase

Check out Pilog which is a query language DSL for working with picolisp's built-in databases.... I'd be interested in hearing from people with more knowledge of SQL than I do to see how they compare.

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