As many folks have noted, our current templating system works ok for simple things, but doesn't scale well -- even moderately complex conditionals or text-munging will quickly turn your template source into what appears to be line noise.And we all thought Perl was bad! ;)There's been talk of Lua as an embedded templating language for a while, and there's even an extension implementation.One advantage of Lua over other languages is that its implementation is optimized for use as an embedded language, and it looks kind of pretty.An _inherent_ disadvantage is that it's a fairly rarely-used language, so still requires special learning on potential template programmers' part.An _implementation_ disadvantage is that it currently is dependent on an external Lua binary installation -- something that probably won't be present on third-party installs, meaning Lua templates couldn't be easily copied to non-Wikimedia wikis.There are perhaps three primary alternative contenders that don't involve making up our own scripting language (something I'd dearly like to avoid):* PHPAdvantage: Lots of webbish people have some experience with PHP or can easily find references.Advantage: we're pretty much guaranteed to have a PHP interpreter available. :)Disadvantage: PHP is difficult to lock down for secure execution.* JavaScriptAdvantage: Even more folks have been exposed to JavaScript programming, including Wikipedia power-users.Disadvantage: Server-side interpreter not guaranteed to be present. Like Lua, would either restrict our portability or would require an interpreter reimplementation. :P* PythonAdvantage: A Python interpreter will be present on most web servers, though not necessarily all. (Windows-based servers especially.)Wash: Python is probably better known than Lua, but not as well as PHP or JS.Disadvantage: Like PHP, Python is difficult to lock down securely.Any thoughts? Does anybody happen to have a PHP implementation of a Lua or JavaScript interpreter? ;)-- brion