Thread:VisualEditor/Feedback/bug 49904 not on roadmap/reply (5)

This line of reasoning still somewhat troubles me. I don't need much convinving that Wikitext is a heaping pile of terrible, or that this is difficult, and, frankly, just wrong. In my mental model a template substitution is similar to a macro application (and happens at "save-time"/"compile time") where a transclusion is similar to a function application (and happens at "display-time"/"run time"). In the VE model "display time" comes before "save time", while in the wikitext model the situation is reversed. I understand that brings challenges with it as the available context is different. I truely understand the brokenness of being able to detect during parsing (which happens at save time in case of template substitution) to detect if you're in a "save time" context or a "display time" context and adjust output accordingly. I feel your pain when I have to think about unsubst, and deciding at "save time" you're not going to do the substitution and just return the wikitext, including the brackets. This is all crap.

When I think about implementations I feel your pain even more; when following the wikitext model, this would mean that the content is substituted as soon as it is entered, but from a usability perspective this is terrible, as there is no way to go back and change the substitution afterwards if you just insert the VE model of the parsed template (if that is even possible, node fragments ftl) - parsed in "save time mode" - right into the VE model being edited. (While I acknowledge the terrible, I could live with this as a first stab at it by the way).

But template substitution is a fairly often used feature - and if it is used fairly often, there are valid use-cases for it. At an intellectual level I understand the desire to know why it is wanted, and what those use cases are, but the bottom line is that you can bet on it there are such use cases, even if you don't yet know them, and they'll just need to get implemented, no matter how much they suck on a technical level. It also means that knowing and understanding the use case won't influence the implementation.

I realise my earlier response was curt, and this response still has some irk in it. The reason for this is that - although I haven't edited much over the past months - I think I'm one of the few people on en.wp who tries to do everything with VE primarily, first of because it can be an amazing product (it is when it works, which is most of the time), and secondly because when I'm doing admin tasks I run across a larger part of the long tail of features than most other tasks, and I can provide the team with feedback on what is working for me and what isn't. A response that I interpreted as "well, we'll be the judge if we find the work you're doing now in wikitext valuable enough to carry over to VE", while at the same time aiming to ultimately completely replace wikitext (again, the latter is a good thing). For me, that doesn't really feel inviting to keep providing that feedback. I hope you can see this perspective as well.