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

[Charles Matthews]

Sheldon Rampton wrote:
> There's too much legacy material that has already been created using  
> the existing syntax, so changing it becomes very difficult. Again,  
> this is en example of path dependency.
>   
Or rather, the retort a dozen years on to Ward Cunningham and "what's 
the simplest thing that would actually work", "well, what do we do if it 
works?" Your argument seems to me not so much about path-dependency, 
which I would say relates more to the social side of WP, but to the 
oldest jokes: "If I wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here". 

As far as templates are concerned, we could start in on deprecation for 
technical reasons and try to improve the worst of it - sounds OK to me 
and still within the "wiki way".

I'm not yet convinced that the absence of WYSIWYG is a barrier to WP 
doing anything specific, and I don't believe that the usability studies 
I have seen prove that it is. But then I tend to believe that the issue 
with expository problems lies in the underestimation of expository writing.

Charles