On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 5:36 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
If the use of templates is going to be as miserable after this switch as it is now, then there's a significant opportunity missed. (I know at least 30 people who stopped editing at least in part because of the template morass we currently have. Some of them wrote featured content.) Nonetheless, it's still important to have template *users* try out templates created using scribunto to make sure that they do actually work as expected. Then I guess the fun will be in determining if any problems come from scribunto or from the template writer's work.
I believe it will be much better after the switch to Lua. Unlike wikitext, which isn't a programming language (but can be made to act sort of like one), Lua is an actual language. Wikitext programming only came about to begin with due to some quirks in transclusion that allowed {{qif}}. ParserFunctions came to fill that need, but were never really designed to do some of the complex logic that modern templates require.
Lua, as a programming language (but the idea applies if we'd chosen JS, Cobol, or anything else) will handle this sort of thing far more elegantly than endless iterations of adding new ParserFunctions to handle more edge-cases.
Granted, I've never written a complex template (only looked and shuddered).
-Chad