It's a shame you couldn't have pitched Common Lisp. Maybe could have ported your DSL pretty quickly and wound up having SBCL output nice compiled assembly instructions and shown x% speed improvement without much effort by using a "sister language" of sorts? ABCL in 2011 would have been a harder sell, it only had its 1.0 release that October.
A few years ago another commenter noted they had developed a trading system in Lisp and C https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25222297 (further comments elaborate a bit) before being asked to rewrite it in Java. What keeps less popular languages alive at companies, when there's no forcing reason to get rid of it like really unacceptable performance, is a conviction (borne out as far as I can tell) that it's ok to hire people who don't know the language -- they'll get up to speed more than fast enough.
A few years ago another commenter noted they had developed a trading system in Lisp and C https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25222297 (further comments elaborate a bit) before being asked to rewrite it in Java. What keeps less popular languages alive at companies, when there's no forcing reason to get rid of it like really unacceptable performance, is a conviction (borne out as far as I can tell) that it's ok to hire people who don't know the language -- they'll get up to speed more than fast enough.