This illustrates my point. You'd be introducing a second language and a large framework with lots of other unrelated stuff -- which is completely unnecessary w

This illustrates my point. You'd be introducing a second language and a large framework with lots of other unrelated stuff -- which is completely unnecessary when you have a language builtin which is perfectly adequate to the task. Yes, yes, I know, separating data from code, filters, escape sanitization, there are a lot of good reasons to use templates. If you're a developer just starting out in web design who is creating a very simple project, string concatenation will let you get up and running without the extra complexity. Of course when your project gets big enough, you'll start to try to modularize things, and then when someone spends 5 minutes explaining templates to the idea, you can immediately see why you want them, because at that point they'll actually reduce the complexity of your project.