I think it does make sense if you consider it in terms of actual language power (a la Automata Theory) as opposed to just varying kinds of Turing-complete languages as it seems you're framing it.
If what you need is a configuration language, please don't express it in Python. If what you need is a regular expression matcher, please don't express it in a bespoke recursive-descent parser written in the enclosing language. If what you need is a SELECT over a large dataset, don't download all rows from the DB and then iterate/filter them on the local host.
I think there are many reasons for this, not just for human readability -- also for performance and security. Berners-Lee is quoted in that wiki article as saying it helps semantic extraction, too, but I personally consider that less convincing.
> If what you need is a configuration language, please don't express it in Python
Oh god please express it in Python more so than anything else. The configuration language file -> templating the configuration language file -> scripting the templates to the configuration language file pipeline has to die.
If you're going to use the simplest thing possible make it easy to throw away when the nerds get more complex instead of having to build the complexity on top. Regex is a great example -- if used internally when you need something more you just throw it away. But if you make a single static regex part of your configuration your users are stuck with it.
> make it easy to throw away when the nerds get more complex
Ironic but true. How often is it actually the needs getting more complex, and how often is it the nerds wanting to make it more complex so they can try out some new tech?
It sounds like we just need more thoughtful configuration file design. None of the tools on my computer, save systemd (which is its own whole mess), are as you describe: most of them are using data formats, and only a few are using shell, Tcl or Python scripts.
If what you need is a configuration language, please don't express it in Python. If what you need is a regular expression matcher, please don't express it in a bespoke recursive-descent parser written in the enclosing language. If what you need is a SELECT over a large dataset, don't download all rows from the DB and then iterate/filter them on the local host.
I think there are many reasons for this, not just for human readability -- also for performance and security. Berners-Lee is quoted in that wiki article as saying it helps semantic extraction, too, but I personally consider that less convincing.
EDIT: automistake/grammar