I'll definitely read the full article later on, but I have to say... I feel there's an addition angle at work here when we're talking about languages that are "typically dismissed as domain-specific".

The thing is that some languages aren't even widely recognized as languages. People think of Mathematica (or Matlab, or Maple) as software suites, as programs they use for something. I know I've certainly heard people say that they can't program, but they know how to use Mathematica. (Why yes, I nearly fainted too, thanks for asking.) Let's see if the recent christening of the Wolfram Language actually helped.