Not necessarily. It's easier in Lisp, and a decades-long tradition, but Lisp is not even the only language of which that's true—there's also Forth. And there are many opportunities to apply this approach beyond those two. The more the better, because each qualitatively different starting point will lead to qualitatively different systems.
The software ecosystem is not well served by everyone being focused on the same few familiar programming approaches. Sure there are economies of scale—better tooling, programmer fungibility—but there is less intellectual diversity. More people should realize the tradeoffs here: yes you lose a lot when you start making your own language, but you also gain a lot. The program you're trying to write becomes more writeable. If that doesn't sound significant, it's because we're so conditioned to think the other way. There's another advantage, too: it's deeply intellectually rewarding. That provides staying power to work on significant projects over the long haul and is a solid motivation to do something many people think is crazy.
Really you can write a DSL in almost any language. I've worked with Java and TypeScript Selenium testing suites that were so project specific with everything abstracted out to methods so much you could barely tell what language you were writing, just that it was some C-descendent
> The software ecosystem is not well served by everyone being focused on the same few familiar programming approaches. Sure there are economies of scale—better tooling, programmer fungibility—but there is less intellectual diversity.
Then it seems that the problem has more to do with political economy than with programmer culture. Capital and managers want programmers to be cogs, not artisans.
Can’t expect programmers to change this political problem, either. Especially considering that the nerdier the technologist, the less political he or she is.
Writing a simple TDD kata in OMeta was really mind opening.
That and Maude is another fascinating language. Pure term re-writing and explicit definitions of all data structures seems almost like a higher level of abstraction or programming.
