I think _all_ programming is about finding an appropriate DSL for the problem at hand. First you need to understand the “language” of the problem then you develop a “lingo”.

Exactly. You build the language up to the problem. When you do that, the program almost writes itself.

For extremely small values of 'sometimes' where sometimes is constrained by the following expressions evaluating to 'true':

- you have no interest in maintaining your code

- your code will never be maintained by someone else

- you know your C preprocessor better than you know your C compiler

- your favorite language isn't available for this particular target

- you don't mind object level debugging

- your idea of a fun time is to spend a few hours per day memorizing code

- you really are smarter than everybody else

It depends how far down the rabbit hole you go.

Something like JCON (originally from mongodb, see https://blogs.gnome.org/chergert/2016/10/21/jcon/) is actually pretty nice IMO.