On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 6:15 PM, Brian<Brian.Mingus(a)colorado.edu> wrote:
<snip>
I really like the ParserFunctions example. Enabled
with hardly any
discussion and now used 500,000 times on the English Wikipedia. It had a
major effect on Wikipedia that made it much harder to use. And now we are
stuck in a programming mindset and we all assume that we all agreed to come
here. It just isn't the case. You won't be able to find where that agreement
happened.
The initial parser functions were a replacement for {{qif}} and kin.
The enwiki community had already adopted a significant degree of
programming in template space. But they did so in a half-assed way
that was bad for server load and template management, so bad in fact
that their approach was provoking arguments between the community and
the developers (see the enwiki history of WT:AUM circa 2006, for
example). The initial parser functions where created to answer that
demand in the community in a way that wouldn't cause the servers to
explode.
Hence the demand for programmatic templates came from the community
initially, the developers simply responded to that in a way that was
necessary to keep things working. (For the record, I'm referring to
the earliest history of ParserFunctions. I'm not sure about the
history of #expr and some of the later bits.)
-Robert Rohde