[WikiEN-l] MediaWiki is getting a new programming language

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 2:49 PM, Cary Bass<cary at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Thomas Dalton wrote:
>> I was already annoyed at him because of his nonsensical comments in
>> the thread he was referencing, so that may have resulted in my
>> original reply being a little more harsh than it would usually have
>> been. I stand by everything I said, though.
>>
> Brian or Brion?

Brian.

On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 2:54 PM, Carcharoth<carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Can someone explain in layman's terms what this programming language
> thing is and how it relates to templates?

It's not anything unless we can figure out something workable, which
isn't clear.  The idea would be that instead of using ParserFunctions
for programming templates, a "real" language like
Lua/JavaScript/PHP/Python/etc. would be made available.  This would
potentially allow much better template performance and maintenance.
It would have no direct effect on people other than template authors,
except that some templates could potentially be made more automated
and thus easier to use.

However, it's not clear that we can implement a language in a way
that's secure, efficient, *and* usable by wikis on shared hosting, so
I don't know whether anything will come of this.