I suspect the Razor engine/language is a case of vendorization. (Razor is a markup templating language which is part of MS Visual Studio.) I suspect MS promoted

I suspect the Razor engine/language is a case of vendorization. (Razor is a markup templating language which is part of MS Visual Studio.) I suspect MS promoted it because it complicates IDE design (parsing) so as to keep other IDE's out of their turf. The prior templating syntax ("<%...%>") was simple to learn, simple to use, easy to read, easy to debug, and easy to parse (per IDE vendor). Razor didn't add much in practical features to justify the huge leap in complexity it caused. It may save 2% of key-strokes but complicated syntax and parsing by a factor of roughly 30. It would have to save at least 25% of keystrokes to justify 30x complexity in my opinion. Let alone debugging and parsing error headaches. Bad deal.