The argument here boils down to: I haven't seen it work in places where I've been employed so it must not work.
Reality check: I've worked on multiple large research teams that successfully developed DSLs still in use by domain experts -- military sigint in one case, doctors in another case, industrial engineers in another.
We developed these languages for specific applications where the domain experts needed to program extremely complex systems to perform tasks in much shorter timeframes than would be possible if programmers needed to get involved.
Why did these DSLs succeed? Funding, manpower, and experienced project managers who delivered constant access to domain experts.
Delivering a successful DSL targeted at narrow domains with non-programmer users is much more resource-intensive than normal software--it's more on the complexity level of a compiler or small OS--but that doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't be done. Plenty of systems couldn't be automated otherwise.
Reality check: I've worked on multiple large research teams that successfully developed DSLs still in use by domain experts -- military sigint in one case, doctors in another case, industrial engineers in another.
We developed these languages for specific applications where the domain experts needed to program extremely complex systems to perform tasks in much shorter timeframes than would be possible if programmers needed to get involved.
Why did these DSLs succeed? Funding, manpower, and experienced project managers who delivered constant access to domain experts.
Delivering a successful DSL targeted at narrow domains with non-programmer users is much more resource-intensive than normal software--it's more on the complexity level of a compiler or small OS--but that doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't be done. Plenty of systems couldn't be automated otherwise.