First of all, working on a framework (Padrino) myself: I firmly believe that "there's nothing better then ours" without actually answering the question properly is a rude thing to tell someone who asks for replacing a part. So, is there a system in place that allows me to use any templating language that conforms to a given protocol? And where can I find that protocol? (in Padrino, for example, this is Tilt)
Okay, whats wrong with hamlet. It begins on google: "yesod hamlet" does not yield any meaningful documentation. "Shakespearean Templates" does. So "Shakespearean Templates"[1] is a whole family of languages that solves a lot of problems already solved, but type-safe. Well... okay, so I do not only have to learn a whole new framework, I also have to learn 3 new languages (-2, if I only care about HTML templating). So, to me, the whole approach rings a bit of "the world is wrong and we fix everything". Considering gregwebs answer: even more so.
Hamlet just doesn't suit my tastes. I don't like auto-closing tags on intendation - any decent text editor should assist you enough to do that properly. I like how you put thought into generating URLs, but thats nothing the templating language should take care of. Also, Hamlet assumes that you are templating HTML - I often template other types as well, for example plain text - hence a need for replacing it by something that fits all needs better. In the end, I also prefer strictly logic-less templates, so hamlet doesn't cut it.
Also, the documentation should see some love. There is no way to have a look at the features (and languages) in isolation: Its a stream of consciousness that introduces features in a half-sentence (I had to grep it to find what "^" means - it was what I expected it to be, but nevertheless).
That said, I still find Yesod a compelling framework and it will be the first haskell framework I'll try out next time I have some spare time. But the first thing I'll do is replace the templating.
[1]: I would prefer if they had anything to do with shakespeare, the esoteric programming language. ;)
> I firmly believe that "there's nothing better then ours" without actually answering the question properly is a rude thing to tell someone who asks for replacing a part
Sorry for being unclear, I asked because I am genuinely curious and I think all the yesod people love hearing feedback. If you check the yesodweb google group, you'll see that Greg and Michael are constantly begging for and responding to constructive feedback.
> Okay, whats wrong with hamlet. It begins on google: "yesod hamlet" does not yield any meaningful documentation.
Yes, documentation sucks, they're working on it.
> I like how you put thought into generating URLs, but thats nothing the templating language should take care of.
All the template does is provide some syntactic sugar with the @{...} notation. The actual URL generation is handled by the dispatch module entirely.
As for templating, shakespeare-text will do plain text, compile time templates. In general, as Greg has said, you can use anything you want.
> Sorry for being unclear, I asked because I am genuinely curious and I think all the yesod people love hearing feedback. If you check the yesodweb google group, you'll see that Greg and Michael are constantly begging for and responding to constructive feedback.
Sorry for being unclear as well: I meant the initial reply by gregwebs but didn't want to start a second comment.
Personally, I can't stand the "lets mix code and markup" style of template systems in general, which includes most templates. I also hated the indentation system, it just doesn't work well in markup heavy templating. I'm fine with indentation in programming (obviously given that we're talking about haskell), but it drove me nuts in templates as I had to indent far too much, it isn't simple blocks of code being indented, it is "indent everything that is inside something else", which is of course everything.
I found it was just as ugly and awkward as JSP/ASP/PHP, but with the added detriment of forcing me to use indentation where I didn't want it to make it look even less clear, and no closing tags so existing tools look at it and puke. I actually like syntax highlighting. I am atypical I think in that I like zope/lift/heist templates where the template is just pure HTML, and it calls out to "snippets" of code to do anything dynamic. But given the indentation issue, I'd sooner use JSP than hamlet.
As explained before in this thread "shakespear-text" is the plain-ERB of Yesod.
To unmix code and markup i'd advise simply use you discipline; it's far to handy to use it sparingly but avoid it otherwise. (But that's my opinion)
I think your contribution of a tag-based template language (like Snap's Heist, or JSP) integration with Yesod will be well received by the Yesod community.
This isn't reddit, please spare us the memes and +1s. I think the odds of such a contribution being well received are quite low given the hostility to that notion the developers of yesod still display. Given that I can't see any benefit to using yesod, it seems like a waste of time for me to contribute an unwanted template engine to it.
> This isn't reddit, please spare us the memes and +1s.
Ok. Yr right, point taken.
> I think the odds of such a contribution being well received are quite low given the hostility to that notion the developers of yesod still display.
Hostility I've never encountered. I think the Yesod is super welcoming contribs (the recent discussion on pipes/conduits being a great example of that).
> Given that I can't see any benefit to using yesod, it seems like a waste of time for me to contribute an unwanted template engine to it.
Do you mean "can't see any benefit to using yesod" over using Snap? Because I see quite a bunch of benefits in that comparison. Let me name the ones I perceive as benefits:
* More type-safe
* Write less code to get it done (using template haskell and quasiquoting -- in other general terms they are "small DSLs")
* More vibrant community
* Faster (Warp is screaming fast)
* More like Rails (yups this is an advantage to me as I quite liked Rails for some reasons that Yesod seems to copy)
The hostility is on display right here, just asking how hard it is to use another template engine gets you a "hamlet is the best" response from one of the devs.
Your list of benefits is a list of things you like. Telling me what you like doesn't make it so that I also like what you like. Yesod offers no advantages to me, as I would be using it without hamlet and without persistent, making it just an uglier happstack or snap. As I said elsewhere, I am one of the significant number of people who feel yesod's over-use of template haskell and qq is unnecessary and detrimental. It seems to appeal primarily to non-haskellers.
7+ hours before you posted this an anwser to Agorak's question "how easy is it to switch templating languages?" was kindly given by Michael Snoyman (lead dev of Yesod).
He says: "I don't think anyone's actually done it, because most of our users really like Hamlet. That said, switching should be a piece of cake. All you need to do is [...removed techincal details...]"
I cannot find anything that you describe as hostile.
I think this whole "hostility" thing you seem to perceive is simply not there. Just friendly open source collaboration for the greater good is what I see.
Yes, he posted that after Greg posted "no, hamlet is the best thing ever nobody can want to use anything else". Greg is the other yesod developer/maintainer. Notice other people have replied with similar sentiments. I think your love of yesod is blinding you.
