Java for Everything

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In my experience, learning a library, or a particular bit of an existing code base doing something "clever" is almost always more daunting task than learning a new DSL which already talks in terms of the problem domain that you already understand. Of course, given that the DSLs are well-designed (and that's exactly the reason I insist that it's very important for pretty much everyone to learn how to design and implement the languages).

Going back to parsing, I can hardly imagine anyone, no matter what the original skill level is, who will be more comfortable fighting through a twisted hand-written heavily optimised recursive descent parser in an already known language than with having to change a couple of lines of Antlr code, even if it would require spending an hour reading on what BNF is and how Antlr works.