The criticism wasn’t only about how limited the DSL was — it was about how some of the design choices are repeating patterns which are very common sources of security defects. HTML and SQL are DSLs themselves and have non-trivial security contexts.

> it's an intentionally limited DSL.

That isn't the sense I get from the example. It shows an entire user-facing web application being written in this language, with every indication that the author thinks this is an appropriate use case.

About that: https://gliimly.github.io/about-gliim.html

Modeling language

Gliimly is a very high-level modeling language. It's about solving problems by modeling the solution and connecting the components to create high-performance, low-footprint executables; and not about managing memory, manipulating bits and bytes or writing complex code.

Syntax matters

Syntax of a language matters, not just for writing code now, but for someone else reading it years later. Gliimly language is designed to be intuitive, easy and rapid in use on both ends, and to be close to the way humans are wired, rather than machines.

Language

Gliimly programming language is memory-safe, meaning it will prevent you from accidentally overwriting memory or freeing it when it shouldn't be. Gliimly's memory-handling is not limited to just memory safety; it also includes automatic freeing of memory at the end of a request, preventing memory leaks which can be fatal to long running processes. Similarly, files open with file-handling statements are automatically closed at the end of each request, serving the same purpose.

Types

Gliimly is a strongly-typed language, with only three primitive types (numbers, strings and booleans) and a number of structured types (message, split-string, array, index, index-cursor, fifo, lifo, list, file and service). Gliimly is a declarative language, with a few lines of code implementing large functionalities. Gliimly is also very simple - it does not even have expressions! That's because it's designed to achieve application goals with less coding.

Statements (see also https://gliimly.github.io/statements.html)

Gliimly statements are designed for safety, ease of use, and ability to write stable code. Most statements typically perform common complex tasks with options to easily customize them; such options are compile-time whenever possible, increasing run-time performance.

Yeah I meant that in a good way. You can build powerful stuff with a DSL that doesn't include the normal imperative programming constructs that most general purpose programming languages, but also some specialized programming languages like bash, include. jq is a nice alternative to python for sifting through JSON for many things.

I think glimly is an interesting project but I wonder why they don't use something like mustache ({{ param1 }} for escaped and {{{ param2 }}} for unescaped) instead of p_web

It's interesting, something to look into. It's not a general purpose language, true, and I think that's a good thing. General purpose languages are too broad for the topic of web services. It's like when SQL came out long ago to make database programming specialized. I think we need something like that for web services, and Gliimly may be a good step forward.