Ben’s arguing in favor of fluent interfaces and higher levels of abstraction and I completely agree with him, working at higher levels of abstraction makes your more productive and DSLs play an important role in problem abstraction.
The trend seems quiet obvious, programming languages are headed towards higher levels of abstraction and specialization, SQL is a perfect example of a high level language that is designed for a specific task. It has a specific purpose, retrieve data from relational databases and it does it well. New languages will cater to a specific domain, some languages will focus on UI development while others may help you create work flows easier.
As developers we should embrace tools that help make our work easier. Having several tools (languages) at your disposal can make solving a complex problem easy, if the language is designed with that problem in mind. Ben mentioned Erlang, a langauge which provides a better solution to concurrent programming problems. Erlang is designed to take advantage of multi-cores; you as a software developer want to create applications which use multi-core cpu fully; currently, it is quite difficult to create such an application Java/C#/Ruby/Python.
As Ben says, don’t fear the abstractions!
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[...] Everyone is blogging about Domain Specific Languages these days. Even beyond DSLs there are a lot of languages these days to care about. C++, C#, VB, ASP.NET, Java, Ruby, Python, PHP. The list goes on and on! Programmers need to know more languages than even the most freakish polyglot savant. [...]
Is This Thing On? » Domain Specific Languages: The New DSL - 1 Nov 07 at 11:36 pm