I think you are missing the point. What's remarkable is that this person is combining basic hacking skills with a completely different career, not the cleverness of the design. Not everyone has to be a poet but amazing societal changes happen when everyone can read and write.
Further thought: Actually, not being a programmer reinforces my original DSL point, not contradicts it. Part of the purpose of a DSL is to reduce as much as possible the "programming" part of the task so the domain expert can concentrate on what needs to be done.
I never said "this guy should have written a DSL instead", which I didn't say because it would be an asshole thing to say. I said that this task screams for a DSL, and that's only more true if this guy isn't a programmer.
Don't worry; some people don't understand threaded conversation, and think that every reply to something has to "continue the conversation" of it.
EDIT: Okay, I'll just repost a comment from about a month ago here, that was upvoted instead of downvoted and yet made exactly the same point:
This is a threaded comment system. We can have as many discussions about something (post or other comment) as we want: go off on wild tangents, point out the spelling, have a pun thread, mention patterns of blogging/commenting the parent fits into, reply to the author on a separate subject, share anecdotes related to the subject of the post, and actually talk about the content of a post or comment, all at the same time, without breaking anything. That's what's so neat about threaded discussion: it doesn't require the "comparative notability" that a linear conversation needs in order to function.
In this case, we can have a discussion about combining hacking skills with a completely separate career, and then have a tangential discussion about using DSLs to generate text, with neither conversation interfering with the other. No one has to be "missing the point," and in fact jerf could be contributing elsewhere in the discussion alongside his creation of this tangent.
