That people even feel this comparison is appropriate is what has me depressed. It represents a fairly fundamental set of misunderstandings.

I agree; you can replace the term "DSL" with "API" in almost every case without losing any essential meaning. (You have to give the hipper-than-thou language pseudo-advocacy, but that's no loss.)

Ergonomic distinctions are useful though, as is the distinction between declarative-style APIs and more imperative ones, which 'DSL' is often used to make.

  unless you.talk :like => "this"

If you're not doing that, I think they're kind of silly.

That's the same argument for filing the serial number off of TDD and calling it BDD: sometime, somewhere, somehow eventually some non-programmer is going to have to maintain source code without a trained professional programmer around to help.

I don't get it; FIT's been around much, much longer. What kind of non-developer business rule expert can read the punctuation-sprinkled pseudo-English pidgin Ruby spreads around but doesn't know how to manipulate tabular data in a spreadsheet?

I don't really get it, but I'm curious. People I respect swear by it.

There are some out there though, for eg. FancyRoutes: http://www.railsinside.com/plugins/252-fancyroutes-a-nicer-d...

  get / 'orders' >> :orders > :index

  with route / :slug / 'order' >> :orders do
    get > :show
    put > :update
  end

  get {'item_images' => :controller} / :image > :show