Some thoughts on Perl template processing

​”mak­ing a tem­plate draw­ing to get a clear vision of the mask your mask­ing” by Douglas R Witt is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

Template proces­sors and engines are one of those pieces of soft­ware where it seems every devel­op­er wants to rein­vent the wheel. Goodness knows I’ve done it ear­li­er in my career. Tell me if this sounds familiar:

1. You need to mix data into a doc­u­ment so you start with Perl’s string inter­po­la­tion in "dou­ble quotes" or sprintf for­mats. (Or maybe you inves­ti­gate formats, but the…