Does it not seem appropriate to get a paper or two out of a "mere" (but well-designed and interesting and useful) library you wrote? Do we think only of big fancy soi-disant "languages" and "systems" as being novel and not-just-the-status-quo enough to deserve recognition or something, that people feel forced to stretch the unsexy truth?
The thing that pushed me over the edge was the ns3 tutorial, where it goes:
We typically run scripts under the control of Waf. This allows the build system to ensure that the shared library paths are set correctly and that the libraries are available at run time. To run a program, simply use the --run option in Waf. Let's run the ns-3 equivalent of the ubiquitous hello world program by typing the following:
./waf --run hello-simulator
Waf first checks to make sure that the program is built correctly and executes a build if required. Waf then executes the program, which produces the following output.
Hello Simulator
Congratulations. You are now an ns-3 user. [emphasis original]
And the source code of this thing is
#include "ns3/core-module.h"
NS_LOG_COMPONENT_DEFINE ("HelloSimulator");
using namespace ns3;
int
main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
NS_LOG_UNCOND ("Hello Simulator");
}
And I'm like, yes, okay, this is Hello World, it's not going to be complicated, but come on, you just wrote Hello World in C with a fancy-named macro interposed between you and printf. The "ns3 network simulator" doesn't stop me from including stdio.h and actually calling printf myself, (I know because I just tried) no more than all these Haskell combinator libraries typically prevent me from using arbitrary Haskell code, thus making it much harder to reason about them than it would be if I actually had a well-defined DSL whose operational semantics I knew the clear limits of.
Then the tutorial goes on to walk you through "writing an ns3 script" by which they mean "writing a C++ program that calls the ns3 library". I just feel creeped out by this, since it seems like an overt way of Sapir-Whorfishly changing what I'm doing to something that more prominently features their brand, you know? I feel marketed-to. It's not just brand X breakfast cereal, it's the brand X breakfast experience. It's not just a C++ program that happens to call ns3 library functions, it's an ns3 script.