Name: Anonymous 2012-02-01 9:05
Reducing the inefficient complexity of complicated templates has long been on the wishlists of those who design and maintain them. It is a complexity that can put a significant drain on server resources, not to mention one that makes accurate duplication of templates between wikis incredibly time consuming and error prone. This complexity is caused by a number of factors, but it has long been recognised that the introduction of certain constructions found in full programming languages (among them loops, arrays and a full range of string functions) would drastically simplify matters.
Of course, the introduction of a programming language would bring with it a number of other problems, particularly with regards to privacy, security and memory footprint. As a result, the long term consensus was that the introduction of a programming language would be a major undertaking, including time for discussing which languages would work best in a heavily sanitised environment. The project as a whole has been discussed at regular intervals, but it was only this week that a consensus seemed to emerge in favour of Lua, a lightweight but relatively unheard-of language generally regarded as being "easy to learn" (wikitech-l mailing list).
The preferred implementation at this time is via a separate namespace for scripts, perhaps augmented by the overloading of the double-curly-brace notation to incorporate both Script and Template namespaces. Work is expected to start after the release of 1.19 and could well centre around the Berlin Hackathon, held annually in May.
Of course, the introduction of a programming language would bring with it a number of other problems, particularly with regards to privacy, security and memory footprint. As a result, the long term consensus was that the introduction of a programming language would be a major undertaking, including time for discussing which languages would work best in a heavily sanitised environment. The project as a whole has been discussed at regular intervals, but it was only this week that a consensus seemed to emerge in favour of Lua, a lightweight but relatively unheard-of language generally regarded as being "easy to learn" (wikitech-l mailing list).
The preferred implementation at this time is via a separate namespace for scripts, perhaps augmented by the overloading of the double-curly-brace notation to incorporate both Script and Template namespaces. Work is expected to start after the release of 1.19 and could well centre around the Berlin Hackathon, held annually in May.