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The argument one's making is that at some point, the complexity of business rules extends the complexity of the DSL you wrote, at which point people tend to evolve DSLs until they become a crappy general-purpose programming language.

For a good example of that, see the evolution of template engines in web development. They quickly accrued conditionals, function definition, recursion, and at some point they just turned into a crappier version of PHP. The latter is doubly ironic when you see people using template engines in PHP, as if not noticing that PHP is already a better templating language.



Good point! I thought about templating also when I read this article. I also like how a similar perspective inspired Tero to develop RiotJS, he is even quoting the Facebook team: "Templates separate technologies, not concerns" - http://riotjs.com


In my eyes, PHP was a template engine to begin with, so it indeed doesn't make sense. But I doubt that your business logic would require to include manual memory management or bitwise operations, for example.




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