Counterpoint: "A Universal Scripting Framework, or: Lambda: the ultimate “little language”"

"Abstract. The “little languages” approach to systems programming is flawed: inefficient, fragile, error-prone, inexpressive, and difficult to compose. A better solution is to embed task-specific sublanguages within a powerful, syntactically extensible, universal language, such as Scheme. I demonstrate two such embeddings that have been implemented in scsh, a Scheme programming environment for Unix systems programming. The first embedded language is a high-level process-control notation; the second provides for Awk-like processing. Embedding systems in this way is a powerful technique: for example, although the embedded Awk system was implemented with 7% of the code required for the standard C-based Awk, it is significantly more expressive than its C counterpart."

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/papers/ll.ps

Little languages are good for little programs. Once your program grows up, a little language starts holding it back. Your program needs a language for grown-ups. The truth is all little languages are quite primitive, and this is by design. Little languages are designed for a specific narrow purpose. Beyond that narrow purpose they are much less expressive, clunky and inefficient.

Real life tasks often require more than one little language. You can start with a simple text extraction using Awk, then use Sed for text conversion, and glue it all together with Bash. But very soon it becomes hard to maintain and extend this collection of scripts and easier to replace them with one Perl or Python program, which can do all of the above and more.

So the bottom line is, use little languages then they suit your task, but know their limitations.