I know what you mean. Somewhere, out there, we'll find an MBA-type, trying to paste an Excel spreadsheet into one of those tabular data types, and a black hole will open up and swallow the Earth whole.

The point of the idea is, if you combined meta-programming and DSLs with Java, you don't have Java anymore. MPS calls their Java dialect "baseLanguage" and it's actually Java + a lot of small DSLs with custom renderings and editors.

MPS is one of the most mind blowing developer projects I ever encountered. But I first played with it years ago and have tried most versions since, and unfortunately it never made it past the "cool, neat, but I don't have a use for it" stage. Somehow I always end up back with regular IntelliJ and Java or Kotlin.

One reason: MPS is one of those concepts that's just such a huge leap over what we do today, I worry about losing other possible contributors if I use it. Also, for example, the projects are stored as giant XML files on disk, so github diff viewers and other text based tools wouldn't work. Perhaps I should just take the leap for a small personal project.

If you look at online demos how the Xerox PARC and Symbiotic systems were being used, it is not far off from MPS and similar.

Yet here we are still trying to make it mainstream.

Sounds bit like the problems SmallTalk has encountered with their image files etc.