https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26092
--- Comment #17 from Happy-melon <[email protected]> 2011-01-04 16:42:53 UTC --- (In reply to comment #16) > I have to agree with Aryeh, there was a pipe-dram about Lua. Now that's dead > this needs escalating. Escalation is the word, certainly... :P > We currently have a situation where templates can stop working for mysterious > reasons. We have simple stuff ten-year-old children used to hack on pocket > money computers 30 years ago, that professional software engineers are > sweating > blood to achieve (or not). Allowing this functionality is not going to make templates stop breaking. If anything, the fear is that it will develop to the point where when they break, they do so in *even more mysterious* ways. > Current situation: > > o Frustrated template writers > o Inefficient (horrendously inefficient) code > o Missing functionality > o Reduced productivity > > Requested situation > > o Happy template writers > o Fast code > o buckets of functionality > o Huge leaps in productivity > > What's not to like? The fact that there is no reason to doubt that this utopia will in fact turn into a dystopia where _frustrated template writers_ are using these string functions to simulate the _missing functionality_ of regular expressions with _horrendously inefficient_ code built on str_sub(). All historical precedent suggests that this is what *will* happen, because those template writers are happiest and most productive when they are pushing the envelope of what is possible. I don't want to look at [[Template:preg_replace]] in three years' time and see something which makes today's string templates look like Hello World functions. I *especially* don't want to see spaghetti bowls of parser function tags which are rendered even more incomprehensible by mystic {{{{{safesubst|}}}foo:...|safesubst={{{safesubst|}}}}} constructs. The objection to StringFunctions is *not*, in general, that the functionality should not be available. It's that we don't want the next generation of functionality to look like the previous generation of functionality, because that is not a good look. Cf http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Happy-melon/sandbox5&oldid=405905787 for how [[Template:Navbox]] could look in python, for instance. Programming languages are designed to be extensible, to retain a similar level of *visual* complexity regardless of the *computational* complexity. ParserFunctions etc, are definitely *not* designed in that fashion. -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are the assignee for the bug. You are on the CC list for the bug. _______________________________________________ Wikibugs-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikibugs-l
