User blog comment:Rappy 4187/Technical Update: April 27, 2016/@comment-9380534-20160428134412/@comment-24473195-20160428163114

> They're a basic part of the system and removing them is harmful (and liable to break hundreds and hundreds of wiki's who don't care about things like Lua or PI's) to Wikia.

Actually, keeping string parser functions places unnecessary stress on the servers  and is quite  more harmful than removing them. They are part of an extension that is not part of Mediawiki, and can be safely disabled at will without any issues at all. .

Wikitext is not and never will be a programming language. String parser functions violate that rule and cause many unnecessary bugs.

If they keep such a bad tool around they should not in my opinion waste any time debugging any errors caused by it.