>Many competing frameworks acted like this wasn't so, and stuck to the old practice of using templates. They missed the obvious lesson here: every templating language inevitably turns into a very poor programming language over time. It will grow to add conditionals, loops, scopes, macros, and other things that are much nicer in actual code. A templating language is mainly an inner platform effect. It targets a weird imagined archetype of someone who isn't allergic to code, but somehow isn't smart enough to work in a genuine programming language. In my experience, this archetype doesn't actually exist. Designers don't want to code at all, while coders want native expressiveness. It's just that simple.

This is exactly what I was getting at when I wrote this recent post about Smarty (in response to the following parent comment proposing building a crippled scripting system for designers), to which somebody insightfully commented "Someone doesn’t like Smarty…"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32886317

parent> Even in game development, it often turns out to be a huge mess that coders have to go and sort out after the fact, it's almost inevitable if it's general purpose enough. If you do decide to build a scripting system for designers, I would recommend being very conservative with features and thinking twice before adding any new feature.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32886424

>DonHopkins 5 days ago | prev [–]

>Just hire competent and trustworthy designers, instead of purposefully crippling the tools you spend so much time developing. The best designers can also code, and if you design a system that discourages instead of encourages designers from coding, you're wasting the potential of those precious coder/designers, and wasting the opportunity to train your best designers to code too.

>It's not as if Rock Star can't find anybody qualified who wants to work for them, or any designers who are willing to learn to code in a powerful visual scripting language.

>This attitude causes disasters like PHP's "Smarty" templating language.

>PHP was already a templating language, but somebody got it in their head that there should be an iron-clad separation between designers and programmers, and that PHP gave designers too much power and confused them, and that their incompetent untrustworthy designers who refused to learn anything about programming deserved something even "simpler" than PHP, so they came up with Smarty.

>Then over time the realized that their designers were powerless, so their programmers would have to learn TWO languages so they could wade into the Smarty templates to make them actually work with all the extra code they had to write because Smarty was so crippled, so they nickle-and-dimed more and more incoherent programming language elements into Smarty, making it EVEN HARDER to use and more complicated and less consistent than PHP, yet nowhere near as powerful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20736574

DonHopkins on Aug 19, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: YAML: Probably not so great after all

One of the most ridiculous examples of this was the Smarty templating language for PHP.

Somebody got the silly idea in their head of implementing a templating language in PHP, even though PHP is ALREADY a templating language. So they took out all the useful features of PHP, then stuck a few of them back in with even goofier inconsistent hard-to-learn syntax, in a way that required a code generation step, and made templates absolutely impossible to debug.

So in the end your template programmers need to know something just as difficult as PHP itself, yet even more esoteric and less well documented, and it doesn't even end up saving PHP programmers any time, either.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100226023855/http://lutt.se/bl...

>Bad things you accomplish when using Smarty:

>Adding a second language to program in, and increasing the complexity. And the language is not well spread at all, allthough it is’nt hard to learn.

>Not really making the code more readable for the designer.

>You include a lot of code which, in my eyes, is just overkill (more code to parse means slower sites).

https://web.archive.org/web/20090227001433/http://www.rantin...

>Most people would argue, that Smarty is a good solution for templating. I really can’t see any valid reasons, that that is so. Specially since “Templating” and “Language” should never be in the same statement. Let alone one word after another. People are telling me, that Smarty is “better for designers, since they don’t need to learn PHP!”. Wait. What? You’re not learning one programming language, but you’re learning some other? What’s the point in that, anyway? Do us all a favour, and just think the next time you issue that statement, okay?

http://www.ianbicking.org/php-ghetto.html

>I think the Broken Windows theory applies here. PHP is such a load of crap, right down to the standard library, that it creates a culture where it's acceptable to write horrible code. The bugs and security holes are so common, it doesn't seem so important to keep everything in order and audited. Fixes get applied wholesale, with monstrosities like magic quotes. It's like a shoot-first-ask-questions-later policing policy -- sure some apps get messed up, but maybe you catch a few attacks in the process. It's what happened when the language designers gave up. Maybe with PHP 5 they are trying to clean up the neighborhood, but that doesn't change the fact when you program in PHP you are programming in a dump.