[Foundation-l] Why is the software out of reach of the community?

[Robert Rohde]

2009/1/15 Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu>:
> The discussion to add a full-fledged programming language to MediaWiki is
> yet another example of this. Rather than evaluate existing tools which allow
> for user-interface extensibility, the developers would rather embed PHP
> within PHP. This allows you to do a variety of things:
>
> * Simulate the brain
> * Write MediaWiki within MediaWiki
> * Compute any function
> * ...
> * Write an enyclopedia?
>
> Our neural simulator contains an embedded dynamic language called C^c. It is
> interpreted C++. I assure you that it does not aid in usability. Our
> software did not start to become truly usable until we tackled the issue of
> user-extensible interfaces.
>
> This issue has already been tackled in MediaWiki, and yet the solution to
> all of our problems is claimed to be a well-designed embedded scripting
> language. This is the largest possible hammer you could apply to the
> problem. I can't see how it is a reasonable next step.

Brian,

You've been advocating Semantic Mediawiki, which would address a
certain set of issues.  However, I don't see how that would make the
template / parser function syntax any less cumbersome (actually,
adding semantic tags would probably make template code marginally more
complicated).  So, it would appear to me that the question of how to
make templates more usable is separate from the question of whether to
enable Semantic Mediawiki.

Did you have a different solution to the template / parser function
usability issues?  What existing tools might you suggest for making
things like Template:Infobox [1] and Template:Cite_web [2] more
accessible?

-Robert Rohde

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Infobox
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Cite_web