2009/7/6 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
2009/7/3 Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com:
{{qif}} was being used massively, even if the majority of the community didn't know about it (or care). It supported their work and allowed them to do the things with templates that they needed in articles. I would argue these complex templates came from the community's needs.
Your last sentence is key here. Templates that present a (relatively) simple interface but have complex plumbing to do cool things are much-wanted and much-needed.
However, the ParserFunctions language sucks because it was made up as it goes along and resembles nothing so much as an [[esoteric programming language]]. A better language will make it easier to program templates that do complex things with a simple interface.
Questionable. Since for fairly obvious reasons you can't let wikipedians execute arbitrary code through templates there is always going to be the problem of wikipedians useing workarounds that generate problematical code.