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While it looks like the source icons originate in Illustrator, what impresses me is the high level of support for other standards, making the icons useful and customizable outside of any graphics software:

"This includes support for emerging formats and technologies like Web Components, CFF, WebP, SVG 2.0, a top-notch, multiweight, unicode-mapped icon web font implementation, SVG animation and a powerful SVG DOM injection tool"

Now, that said, I've longed for an alternative to Illustrator. I like your thinking around the DSL, but because this is all inherently visual work, nothing will become widely adopted until the visual design tools supporting the standard are excellent.

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You don't need a GUI or expensive programs to make very stunning and impressive graphics. I've coded SVG manually myself (using Jade templates) and I've written TikZ and asymptote and it works very very well. Remember, we are programmers and not graphic designers who need Illustrator since they often don't code.

Check out some stuff they do over at tex exchange:

http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tikz-pgf

You can also easily take existing SVG and extract the curve formats out, normalize them and integrate them in your project as a few arrays. You wouldn't start from scratch and have to redraw the github logo. You just put it into source code and things such as arrows you can draw with a few commands

They don't care. Designers don't care that you can code SVG manually yourself. They use Illustrator because it is the best software to do what they want. You need to respect that this is how designers work if you want to be taken seriously by designers--and that's step one of changing anything.

If it requires a text editor, you just lost 95% of designers (conservative guess) and you won't get them back because you've shown that you don't respect how they work.

No need to require a text editor to create SVG icons, just use Inkscape http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/inkscape-0-48-revie... and then add your work to openclipart.org

No doubt Illustrator is capable of exporting to SVG, and that is really an essential for any sort of web icons in the HTML5 age.

Illustrator and related formats - EPS, AI - are considerably more featureful than SVG supports. They are able to mash their documents down to SVG, at the cost of losing data. Which nobody will do for raws.

And, as is so common with open-source attempts at graphics software, nobody takes Inkscape seriously. Sorry.

I don't say that designers should program instead of using their tools. What I say is: Stop the craziness of 50 different projects which give you some set of icons. Each a little different but each repeating things over and over again. Let's define one framework and go from their and satisfy 95% of all projects.

Let's stop the craziness of 50 different programming languages which all bundle slightly different sets of features. Can't we just put all the features in one language?

The reason to use one icon set on a web page is that the icons look good together. Putting a bunch of different icon styles in one set defeats this. A good designer has the skills to bust out Sketch and make another icon in the same style if they need it, and then contribute it back to the set for consideration.

If you're not able to do this, there's always http://icomoon.io/app/ which lets you bundle icons from different sets into one font.

So another standard for the next project to ignore in favor of creating a new standard?

Hmm.

I'd use an existing programming language (asymptote or scala) and build a framework to create a bunch of EPS/PNG/SVG icons.

No new file format....

This is what I mean with DSL:

http://asymptote.sourceforge.net/doc/Tutorial.html#Tutorial

And who, among the people who actually design and build icons, would care?

Hint: they use Illustrator. They're going to keep using Illustrator. They're not going to stop using Illustrator so you can have a marginally easier Github workflow.