On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 12:28 PM, geni
<geniice(a)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.
--
Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man)