If you're going to make a serious argument that "DSLs are, universally, awful" then you're going to need to account for regular expressions a bit more carefully. That can be you admitting that you just dislike them and don't use them so consider them awful as well, but if you don't hate them then you may want to focus on the why, and it is likely a much more interesting conversation topic to pursue than "DSLs bad".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_language
Regular expressions have a deep mathematical background. An ad-hoc DSL from a company that specifies infrustructure does not.
> Regular expressions have a deep mathematical background. An ad-hoc DSL from a company that specifies infrustructure does not.
You very specifically went far beyond making any statement about ad-hoc DSLs from companies that make infrastructure. You said "DSLs are, universally, awful".
I'm also interested why you left out makefiles in your original rebuttal. I think makefiles are a good example a simple and useful DSL for accomplishing what it sets out to do. That's not to say it can't turn into a mess (what language, domain specific or not, is free from that concern?), not that it solves all needs to all people, but makefiles are simple, straightforward, solve a useful problem, are well known by many people (and easy to explain and teach), and I don't think most people would consider them a mathematical concept core to computer science. Are they awful? If so, why?
Sure, Makefiles are a DSL. Just a horrible one. They just make my point in a different way. Have you used a Makefile recently? They are AWFUL. Brittle, complex, half-bash, invisible-tab-prefixed, abominations, sent from another millenium. Let's take a modern codebase - say Python - you're much better to just use something like pyinvoke - handles all the CLI-level stuff, and you get the full force of the programming language you were writing in the first place.
A Regex, SQL, TLA, CSS and so on are all better DSLs than allowing a general purpose language because they are meant to restrict inputs of lower priority than other goals, where priorities are largely fixed.
A corporate DSL is meant to expand to whatever grandiose plans the company has for accepting impractical input from platinum customers.
