Aryeh Gregor wrote:
On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 12:28 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
How well do those concepts stand up when you have a lot of people copying and pasting code they don't really understand (writing an infobox from scratch is hard modifying an existing one less so)?
Pretty well, I suspect. Of course, real languages are less tolerant of error than templates (even PHP makes syntax errors fatal), but I don't think the bar to entry would be huge. You might also get more real programmers willing to deal with complex templates instead of avoiding them like the plague because the language is so hideous, as I at least currently do.
If we have things like functions and libraries, it may actually do better than the current system. It would be easier to just have one main template that contains most of the more complex code, subtemplates would just include the main template and call the necessary functions and there'd be less need for copy/pasting. This is already done to a certain extent with "meta-templates," but they aren't quite as versatile as they could potentially be with a real programming language.