Templating Languages Considered Harmful
This is a post in its idea generation phase. I'm collecting notes for what to write about. Proceed at will.
I.e., frontend templating languages like Liquid and Nunjucks.
Can’t set attribute on object
-
Errors from wrong file location, or even wrong file
e.g., I’ve learned that when I see an error in my programming languages tooltips file, it’s actually somewhere else.
[11ty] Problem writing Eleventy templates: (more in DEBUG output)
[11ty] > Having trouble rendering njk template ./studio.njk
`TemplateContentRenderError` was thrown
[11ty] > (./studio.njk)
Template render error: (/Users/max/repos/website-3/_includes/programming-language-tooltips.njk) [Line 113, Column 21]
attempted to output null or undefined value
`Template render error` was thrown:
[11ty] Template render error: (./studio.njk)
Template render error: (/Users/max/repos/website-3/_includes/programming-language-tooltips.njk) [Line 113, Column 21]
attempted to output null or undefined value
at Object._prettifyError (/Users/max/repos/website-3/node_modules/nunjucks/src/lib.js:36:11)
at /Users/max/repos/website-3/node_modules/nunjucks/src/environment.js:563:19
at eval (eval at _compile (/Users/max/repos/website-3/node_modules/nunjucks/src/environment.js:633:18), <anonymous>:140:12)
at /Users/max/repos/website-3/node_modules/nunjucks/src/environment.js:571:11
at Template.root [as rootRenderFunc] (eval at _compile (/Users/max/repos/website-3/node_modules/nunjucks/src/environment.js:633:18), <anonymous>:23:3)
at Template.render (/Users/max/repos/website-3/node_modules/nunjucks/src/environment.js:552:10)
at eval (eval at _compile (/Users/max/repos/website-3/node_modules/nunjucks/src/environment.js:633:18), <anonymous>:139:10)
at fn (/Users/max/repos/website-3/node_modules/a-sync-waterfall/index.js:26:24)
at /Users/max/repos/website-3/node_modules/a-sync-waterfall/index.js:66:22
at executeSync (/Users/max/repos/website-3/node_modules/a-sync-waterfall/index.js:8:15)
[11ty] Copied 39 files / Wrote 0 files in 0.94 seconds (v1.0.0)
e.g., what this really means is that i forgot to put sufficient frontmatter (a title) in a new post. (actually, the one i’m writing right now.) programming-language-tooltips.nj doesn’t require the title.
-
Hard to do normal programming things:
- Find out what variables are available
- Find out what their values are
- Debug
- Even see that errors are happening (e.g., nunjucks error in eleventy, nothing printed)
-
New, custom syntax for basic things
- The attr accessor one
-
Nunjucks may be the best (?) but it lacks basic documentation for builtin operations
- TODO: find
-
… and it’s abandoned
- TODO: find
Consistently the biggest barrier to working on every iteration of my website. I’m glad that at least with Eleventy, if I really need to, I can do a bunch of crap in JavaScript and just pipe data structures into Nunjucks. (Though even that can be rough to use.)
