[zevv]

“we’re back where we started four years ago, hard coding everything, except now in a much crappier language.”

Not sure if I agree with this. A proper designed DSL has the advantage of being much closer to the domain of the problem it is supposed to solve. Your code written in the DSL now might end up as 'hard coded' part of the application, but it likely conveys much more meaning in much less code because it is tailored to the core functionality of the application.

[masfuerte]

Design a DSL. But instead of implementing it, implement the same abstractions in the functions (or classes or whatever) of your code. Effectively, you are implementing the DSL without the parser and AST.

When you chain these functions together into business logic they will be just as readable as the DSL would have been. But you still get an IDE with code completion, debugging, etc.