Indeed. I, for one, think that over-proliferation of DSL's can be a Bad Thing. To use one example from my own experience: I spend a lot of time coding in a Groovy / Grails environment. Now, I like Grails and Groovy, but Grails introduces it's own weird DSLs for things like:

configuring Spring Beans configuring Log4J defining URL mappings configuring Hibernate mappings & queries etc.

Now some of those are cool, but at least some of them replace other techniques that I already know, and find much more readable and understandable. Configuring Log4J, for example. I'd much rather simply jam a log4j.xml in there and forget about the Grails DSL.

The thing is, none of these DSL's is, in and of itself, necessarily bad in any way... but there's a bit of "cognitive overload" in having to deal with 3 or 4 or 5 new DSLs, on top of the base Groovy stuff. The flip side is, these DSLs mean that your configuration is done mostly in .groovy files and you can use normal groovy syntax for looping and accessing variables, etc. So it's easier to code up more dynamic configurations than if you were using XML files or .ini files.

Anyway, the point of this rant is not to say "DSLs are bad" but just to lend weight to the suggestion that they aren't universally Good either.

Not knowing anything about Grails, does the Log4j DSL not do the equivalent of generating the XML config, and if not, would you have preferred a system where you could choose to write your own config or let the DSL do it for you?