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.