Plain shell is pretty good for templating, and it's the most available language on Unix. You have here docs for long literals, and you can choose to use $var e

Plain shell is pretty good for templating, and it's the most available language on Unix. You have here docs for long literals, and you can choose to use $var expansion or not with EOF or 'EOF' (yes it's a confusing syntax). You have loops and conditionals, and functions that take parameters to modularize it (e.g. a function for each table row). Sequential composition "concatenates" stdout. At the end you redirect it all like this, which is inconvenient in other languages: top-level-function > out.html ---- For example, I generate this page with shell: http://www.oilshell.org/releases.html http://www.oilshell.org/releases.html And it's separated into 3-4 functions here: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/blob/master/devtools/release.sh#L809 https://github.com/oilshell/oil/blob/master/devtools/release... ---- Shell falls down when you have to generate complex logic as with tables [1], but m4 also falls down there. I actually experimented with many different methods in order to help me design the Oil language. This is generated with awk, and it has some advantages over shell: https://www.oilshell.org/release/0.8.pre3/test/spec.wwz/osh.html https://www.oilshell.org/release/0.8.pre3/test/spec.wwz/osh.... These two are generated with Python: https://www.oilshell.org/release/0.8.pre3/test/spec.wwz/alias.html https://www.oilshell.org/release/0.8.pre3/test/spec.wwz/alia... https://www.oilshell.org/release/0.8.pre3/test/wild.wwz/ https://www.oilshell.org/release/0.8.pre3/test/wild.wwz/ So I hope Oil will do better than shell, awk, and Python. ----- Shell needs to be better for escaping. Template languages like Jinja do better there. I put m4 in the "70's-style macro processing bucket" which is generally sloppy about escaping. I use Python for escaping here, but I do it with O(1) processes and not one process for every tiny fragment that needs to be escaped! Git Log in HTML: A Harder Problem and A Safe Solution http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/09/29.html http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/09/29.html