Re:How we made editing Wikipedia twice as fast
by davidgerard on Thursday January 01, 2015 @09:43AM
(#8823034)
Actually, it's been around for years - it was accidental. ParserFunctions is a good example of a DSL accidentally achieving Turing-completeness, at which point people start doing awful, awful things in it because they can. So they went to Lua because a proper programming language is superior in every way to an accidental one.
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Re:How we made editing Wikipedia twice as fast
by eru on Thursday January 01, 2015 @07:38PM
(#8824964)
You actually have to be really careful to design a language that's both useful and not Turing-complete. Regular expressions are one example of such a language, but they are not strong enough for templating.
Re:How we made editing Wikipedia twice as fast
by davidgerard on Thursday January 01, 2015 @08:42PM
(#8825140)
Yeah. It wasn't actually intended to be Turing-complete, but then some excessively creative goddamn lunatic came up with a way to beat MediaWiki syntax with ParserFunctions into yielding a truly hideously inefficient "if" statement. Soooo they gave up and codified that so the CPUs wouldn't melt.