Speaking of complex templates, has there been any work to move existing templates to Lua? Because I'd love to start on the ArticleHistory template if nobody else is doing it.
*--* *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2015 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerromeo@gmail.com
On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 5:43 PM, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
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
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