On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 1:18 AM, stevertigo<stvrtg(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 1:56 AM, Steve
Bennett<stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Erm, the MediaWiki template language survives
because it has a
monopoly. There is no alternative. It doesn't really matter how bad it
is - there is nothing users could switch to.
The word "monopoly" implies unfair business practices such that make
an inferior product the exceedingly market-dominant one. Putting aside
its basic inapplicability in an open-source context, and the fact that
in that context people will make free choices to use a tool, and not
to mention participate in that tools' further development.. what is
the argument?
Sorry to offend you. The claim made was that users continued to use
the MediaWiki template language because it was "good enough". I say
users continue to use it because there is no alternative. If you
wanted to make templates in Wikipedia, you'd write them in BrainFuck*
if that was the only language available.
Steve
* With a tip of the hat to David G. I've never written BrainFuck, but
I have written a fungeoid interpreter...