<This reply still isn't anything official, but does represent my own views as a developer (both volunteer and staff)>
On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 12:30 PM, pi zero wn.pi.zero@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, there is in fact a lisp interpreter written in Lua. It makes up for some other weaknesses of templates. I expect most users not to have to touch that most of the time, and when they do they'll usually be able to just copy others' markup and make slight, obvious modifications. It's so vastly handy that I've used it (you've reminded me) in some of the dialog templates, just because it's so much easier to do things with it. I created it because it was obvious I'd need a powerful succinct way, without the cumbersome notational overhead of templates or Lua (or JavaScript, perish the thought), to specify transformations of the raw content of a wiki page;
Is there an actual problem with Scribunto that drove you to writing this lisp interpreter, or is it just that you don't like the fact that Scribunto forces you to separate Lua code from templates?
I consider this separation a good thing, as even if it is more work for the developer it makes things much easier for everyone else to understand later.
I do agree that templates are rather broken, although frankly the Foundation could --- with some deep insight --- have done things that would have improved them. The current plethora of magic words is a mess, partly because the template call-syntax is heavy and pure template/magic-word usage keeps sending things back to typeless text;
The Foundation *did* do something. It's called Scribunto.