Yeah I think HTML is a good exams of a domain spec language. Instead of putting HTML in a dead string it can be in a parsible lisp object can be manipulated with editor commands. Of course you can do the opposite and have HTML file with lisp code embedded. Ie like a jsp in Java. But with lisp all this is at your finger tips. You don't need to wait for a big billionaire company to make html syntax for you. Or unit test supported at the language level. Or whatever

Embedded SQL is also quite common.

Yes but in my experience (with korma, which I don't like) I've not used a lot of programmatic modification of SQL queries. At the end of the day, I write a query for "a data question", and I add parameters to the question, but it is rare for me that I need to "create new types of questions" on the fly.

Even if I need to compose a query for a more flexible questioning than using a value parameters, this is something that typically could be done by combining 2 or 3 substrings, there is not typically the need to work queries as much as I do with HTML and hiccup.

So at the end I moved to HugSQL (the modern+popular "write your queries in SQL"-philosophy library) instead of YesQL (the modern+popular "write your queries in clojure"-philosophy library, similar in approach to korma).

Yes, sometimes that suffices. Other times you have to translate an ad–hoc query language encoded in the query parameters of a url into SQL queries, and then it would be really nice to have some way of manipulating them other than just string concatenation. That's a month of my life I’ll never get back.

Ok, fair point, you don’t need it until you need it and you wish you had it :)