Board Thread:Lua Help/@comment-24473195-20150504194158/@comment-24473195-20150531163002

"I'd argue that they're actually a very basic programming language (despite mediawiki devs doing their best to resist wikitext being such)."

I do agree it is certainly a very basic programming language. But unlike PF, lua requires considerably more knowledge. A single comma or full stop in the code is enough to render the whole thing useless, unlike parser functions. Personally, I'm with mediawiki developers, I think they should deprecate PF, and port everything to lua.

"I t's not uncommon for wikis to have subtly or hugely different templates for the same purpose because they had different needs and different people writing them."

Indeed, the difference is that we can reduce the repetition. Despite all their money and assets, wikia's resources are not infinite. Repeated code in parserfunctions, api, or lua is not an efficient use of their or our (wiki contributors) time because they'll ultimately have to maintain all these code/documentation and fix bugs related to it.

Besides wikitext was never written to be a programming language, and has a lot of built-in limitations.