Wikipedia Chooses Lua As Its New Template Language

bonch writes "In an attempt to tackle the inefficient complexity of its current template system, Wikipedia will be adopting the Lua scripting language. Known most for its use in videogame scripting, particularly World of Warcraft, Lua is lightweight and designed for easy integration into existing applications. The transition is expected to begin after the release of MediaWiki 1.19, possibly in May." Basically, the template system started turning into an ugly programming language. There was debate over using Javascript or Lua; Lua ultimately won due to implementation concerns. The mailing list threads announcing the decision and discussing the change have further details.

Comments

Re:Stop delaying the inevitable.

[dkf]

"the template system started turning into an ugly programming language" - ah, any sufficiently complex system eventually evolves to contain a limited, broken version of Common Lisp.

This includes Common Lisp, which contains itself as a proper subset.

Re:Raw- or OOP-base Lua?

[nahdude812]

There is a LUA PHP PECL extension: http://pecl.php.net/package/lua

It's relatively new, but this kind of attention could really skyrocket the extension forward. It's a great idea at large, there are a variety of situations where you want to defer decisions to your customer. Historically that meant creating a kind of pseudo DSL with a bunch of forms to fill out for the customer, with hopefully most major options covered, but usually failing to satisfy a variety of corner cases.

Another alternative is the V8JS extension (JavaScript). The advantage of JS is that more people know it already, and in may ways, JS is surprisingly elegant (not that Lua isn't). It won't perform as well as LUA though, and requires more resources to maintain the VM.

Re:Not a language problem

[David Gerard]

That's the precise problem. 1. the language was never designed, it accreted, and is mathematlcally impossible to describe fully in most sensible formats. 2. we can't throw it away because there's billions of words of text in it accumulated over ten years. 3. we can't throw it away because the existing editor base demand it stay because they're used to it.

So WMF is (a) throwing money as well as brilliance at the problem, and (b) has put Brion Vibber onto sorting out what is to be removed from wikitext, because he's one of two people (Tim Starling the other) that people will accept the opinion of on this matter. All proceeds well :-)

So now the problems are with seriously complicated things like doing bidirectional text properly - a hard requirement for an international project, and one that is not done quite properly by anyone else. Something where mere dev brilliance has half a chance :-)