On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 5:36 PM, Risker <[email protected]> wrote:
> If the use of templates is going to be as miserable after this switch as it
> is now, then there's a significant opportunity missed. (I know at least 30
> people who stopped editing at least in part because of the template morass
> we currently have. Some of them wrote featured content.) Nonetheless, it's
> still important to have template *users* try out templates created using
> scribunto to make sure that they do actually work as expected. Then I guess
> the fun will be in determining if any problems come from scribunto or from
> the template writer's work.
>
I believe it will be much better after the switch to Lua. Unlike wikitext, which
isn't a programming language (but can be made to act sort of like one), Lua
is an actual language. Wikitext programming only came about to begin with
due to some quirks in transclusion that allowed {{qif}}. ParserFunctions came
to fill that need, but were never really designed to do some of the complex
logic that modern templates require.
Lua, as a programming language (but the idea applies if we'd chosen JS,
Cobol, or anything else) will handle this sort of thing far more elegantly than
endless iterations of adding new ParserFunctions to handle more edge-cases.
Granted, I've never written a complex template (only looked and shuddered).
-Chad
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