I disagree with your supposition. I think highly specialized languages exist and are highly useful to non-programming communities. I think there is plenty of proof of their usefulness and room for growth.
For instance, consider illustrator products or d3? Both of these are specialized ("deep") tools for creating pictures that I've used extensively in the "pretty pictures and reporting" stage you outlined.
Also of serious note are BUGS[1], JAGS[2] and (recently) Stan[3] as small semi-declarative languages for MCMC model building, fitting, and checking.
SQL is an obvious example of a component of the "simple transformations" step.
Comments
I disagree with your supposition. I think highly specialized languages exist and are highly useful to non-programming communities. I think there is plenty of proof of their usefulness and room for growth.
For instance, consider illustrator products or d3? Both of these are specialized ("deep") tools for creating pictures that I've used extensively in the "pretty pictures and reporting" stage you outlined.
Also of serious note are BUGS[1], JAGS[2] and (recently) Stan[3] as small semi-declarative languages for MCMC model building, fitting, and checking.
SQL is an obvious example of a component of the "simple transformations" step.
[1] BUGS http://www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/bugs/ [2] JAGS http://mcmc-jags.sourceforge.net/ [3] Stan http://mc-stan.org/