[1337shadow]

For me the real subject would be "the death of templates in favor of decorator based objects", which could have been predicted by the GoF that recommended the decorator pattern for GUIs, and makes great sense for the tag-based language that HTML is.

Template languages often impose language limitations to make easier for HTML/CSS coders to work with, without breaking the backend code, isolating their codebase from the backend codebase.

These limitations make them less composable and reusable than functions or objects, and obviously show more drawbacks than advantages for one-man-development, and reuse across projects.

My wild guess is that if we replace templates by components on the server side, we will see less React & friends, for me they mainly demonstrate the clear win of component based patterns against template spagetti.

[danjac]

Seems we are going full circle: the Python ecosystem had component-based template languages such as ZPT (Zope Page Templates) and Genshi. The former I think is still used with the Pyramid framework, but mostly these approaches have been replaced by Django/Jinja2 text-based templates. So in Jinja2 or Django you would have something like:

    <h1>{{ page_title }}</h1>

But in ZPT:

    <h1 tal:content="context/title">Sample Page Title</h1>

If you squint hard enough this doesn't look a million miles different from React or Vue.

This approach largely fell out of favor, but I don't know whether that was just due to Django's popularity vs other Python frameworks or Django template language just being more flexible and approachable, especially for front-end developers (and you could use it for any kind of text based content, such as emails).

[marcosdumay]

It was that the template engine got a Turing complete text declaration language, while the tag based one had to rely on hacks that didn't scale very well. Also, as you said, because the template engine were useful for any kind of data, while the tag one carries a lot of opinions about the resulting text.

More flexible and conceptually simpler tend to win over time, as people try to learn less things.