[Catalog-sig] Tal to Django/Jinja transition

[anatoly techtonik]

On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 5:59 PM, Fred Drake <fdrake at acm.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 2:57 PM, anatoly techtonik <techtonik at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Here comes the second question. Considering that I have an idea how to
>> do this in Django and:
>> 1. more users are familiar with Django templates than with TAL
>> 2. people are unlikely to learn another language for PyPI
>> 3. Django templates are used in AppEngine port
>> 4. Django templates seems way more simple and no less powerful
>
> Some may consider me biased with respect to ZPT, but I think I can be
> reasonable.
>
> Having recently looked at Django templating language (via Jinja2), I found
> the language to be more confusing.  I'm not generally a fan of template
> languages (though I concede that they're useful, and use ZPT regularly),
> the set of assumptions that seem present in the Django language revives my
> wariness and mistrust of templating.

We are all technical people here. I learned Django templating, because
I have to patch Rietveld. I tried to learn TAL to patch Roundup, but
couldn't find a sane reference, so I learned by example, but still
can't find a way how to patch PyPI for my simple use case. Django docs
are much better in this respect.

So, as we are all technical people here, do you have any specific
critics towards one approach or another, so I can at least get an idea
why people like TAL and may prefer it over Django given equal
familiarity and experience in both languages?
--
anatoly t.