[stringtemplate-interest] On Pragmatism Violating Purity For The Win

[Jonathan Buhacoff]

>
> We all believe ST's purity is valuable, but if many people can't use  
> ST, who cares?  I believe purist inflexibility is hurting ST for  
> some projects and crimping its growth.  I believe something like  
> "model.*" addresses critical ST adoption issues and makes ST more  
> accessible, flexible, and relevant to more projects.
>
Here's my take, for what it's worth:

The world already has enough text generation systems without a strict  
separation between model and view. It doesn't need another one.

I believe that ST's growth in popularity will be precisely because it  
maintains a strict separation that attracts programmers who are  
suffering from spaghetti-code syndrome with other tools.

At any rate, that's why I enjoy using ST, and I know that I can  
completely swap out the model if I want to.  That's won't easy to do  
if litter my templates language-specific "hooks".  I like ST because  
it prevents me from doing what I'll regret later.  Contrast with JSP,  
Velocity, Text::Template, and others for which it's not possible to  
change the model.

If the strict separation & the convenient functional syntax makes ST  
good -- then giving that up for the sake of making ST popular will  
make it less good.

Everything that needs to be done to "massage" data can be done and  
should be done in the model.  Employ whatever middleware you like --  
in the model.  It will be a lot more powerful there.

ST does have nice convenience features for pushing objects directly to  
the view (so you don't have to copy all their properties to a map) and  
of course you can abuse these with side-effect programming... but that  
would be abuse of a feature, as opposed to something built-in to  
encourage entanglement of model and view.

I think it's fine if ST is less popular, as long as it stays the most  
useful :)

Jonathan

> Cheers,
>
> = Joe =
>
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