On 19/08/11 04:50, Tim Starling wrote: <snip>
I'm very anxious about getting this right. I think the current situation with template programming on Wikimedia wikis is terrible, and I think it's largely my fault. The language is ugly and inaccessible, causing metatemplate editing to be confined to a small group of elite editors, and it's slow, causing save times of 40 seconds or more on popular articles. Perhaps by supporting the right solution here, I can gain some absolution.
At the time you implemented the templates and parserfunctions, the community gave you a huge "thank you!". It was probably better to have barely usable feature than no feature at all :-)
When you wrote your code, I am sure you never thought the community will push your system to its limit. So there is nobody to blame you on that.
For the good part, the functions lowered the pressure imposed to the few core devs by the community since YOU enabled them to create new features!
We probably should have created PHP extensions for the most used templates. The enwiki {{citation}} template comes to mind.
Just to help you on the way to absolution, please remember your day is in roughly 2 months!!! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tim_Starling_Day