Board Thread:New Features/@comment-24739709-20150518230347/@comment-4189499-20150608120613

I will say one thing in favour of these parser function based templates: They're much easier to learn than Lua. Wikitext templates with parser functions was the first touch of programming I ever had, and because it was relatively easy to learn, it whetted my appetite to look into programming further rather than scarring me off at the first hurdle. While parser function templates can turn ugly if used for purposes far beyond what they were designed, for most instances, they work perfectly well and allow users a friendly first look into things such as holding repetitive code in separate modules (analogous to functions/methods) and conditional statements, some of the foundations of programming. So I actually think that in most cases, wikitext based templates using parser functions are actually better than using Lua on smaller templates, which are in the majority of templates used, as it reduces the amount of hunting to find each needed part of the code, analogous to holding all methods of a short program in a single file. Just my two cents to add in defence of these "Franken-templates".