o Steve Kelly da Metacase (que faz um toolkit de DSL's concorrente com o da Microsoft), em um post sobre modelação de variabilidade, em que faz a seguinte analogia que me pareceu interessante:

Compare the freedom of C or Java to walking. If you walk, you can get pretty much anywhere, by pretty much any route you choose. When trains were invented, you could suddenly travel between a limited number of points much faster. The downside was that the choice of points and the timetables were set by the train companies, and they might not suit you. This was something like the CASE tools of the 80s: the tool vendors fixed the modeling languages and code generators. Just like a train could move you a large distance, the tools could generate lots of code -- but if the result was that you ended up somewhere you didn't want to be, the fact that you got there quickly was little comfort.

With the advent of the automobile, people could travel quickly to a destination of their choice, at a time that suited them -- but only if the road network was in place. That's rather like the situation with domain-specific modeling: you have a tool that lets you model as you want, and generate the code you want -- but until someone builds the "roads", you're going nowhere.

Outro aspecto que considero interessante é aplicar a esta analogia questões relacionadas com custo/tempo.