alt Hacker NewsYup, and every time it breaks, you've got to pester someone whose job probably isn't maintaining that thing actively.
I worked at a startup with massive NIH syndrome, once. We even used our own in-house programming language, because it was "better than anything else out there on the market." It did have a lot of nifty features that others don't have: a pretty novel type system, programmatic macros, a built-in build system and other fun bells and whistles -- but also not-so-fun ones like having no syntax highlighter, LSP, or debugger, and having to constantly shuffle around your code to avoid ICEs in the compiler.
The compiler wasn't the product, but we found ourselves fighting that thing more actively than any of the real problems our custom programming language was supposed to solve. The CTO found himself spending all his nights and weekends mostly trying to get the compiler to not explode.
A few years later, after I had long left (for that reason, among many) I heard they switched to Python. Can't imagine how long it took them to get that all rewritten.
> e even used our own in-house programming language, because it was "better than anything else out there on the market." It did have a lot of nifty features that others don't have: a pretty novel type system, programmatic macros, a built-in build system and other fun bells and whistles
A DSL can work, but not for the features you list. Those features you already get from existing languages anyway!
If you need general programming language features like excellent type system, programmatic macros, a build system (doesn't need to be built into the language), etc... then use a general purpose programming language.
I have a DSL for backend/endpoints, and exactly none of those are in my feature list. What it has are things like easy way to specify access-control directives[1], the SQL query to execute, mapping request variables to SQL parameters, mapping SQL results-sets to response fields, etc.
I have another DSL for a test program. Both of those DSLs have specs that's literally 2x screens of bullet points and examples. LLMs can output those DSL programs because the spec for the DSL is so small.
For general purpose programming stuff (while loops, conditionals, etc) my DSLs break out to Python.
A good indicator that you shouldn't be creating a new language for production is when you find yourself implementing conditionals, loops, etc.
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[1] Limit endpoint to specific roles, or members of the same team, or both, or even to the user itself - someone calling `/user/profile/update` should only be allowed if the profile they are updating is theirs, for example.