[acdha]

> It's like hiding the kitchen knives because they might be misused.

I used to agree with this more strongly but over time decided the Django model was actually more effective as your cue to ask whether you should have been writing a Python function instead and calling it (which has been super easy since something like 1.4 or so IIRC).

Unless you have a small, very diligent development team it always seemed to end up with people coming up with thickets of template logic which were harder to understand and test but because they’d grown so complex people would act like it’d be an excessive amount of work to switch. I had a few projects where I delivered order of magnitude performance improvements while replacing hundreds of lines of ugly code, especially since using Python directly made things like caching and more complex formatting much easier.

[seanwilson]

> over time decided the Django model was actually more effective as your cue to ask whether you should have been writing a Python function instead and calling it

I get the motivation, but is disallowing brackets and proper variables really the right way to do this? These make code clearer to read and reduce duplication more than they introduce complexity so this is going too far in my opinion and feels arbitrary.

[acdha]

Oh, believe me, I’ve been on both sides there. My observation was that over time the burden of maintenance and on-boarding new developers pushed me from wanting more flexibility to saying that the restriction was more valuable than I thought.