> For some reason, "<?= $foo ?>" was considered much worse than "{$foo}". A stigma that remains to this day, even though the spec is very clear about those kin

> For some reason, "<?= $foo ?>" was considered much worse than "{$foo}". A stigma that remains to this day, even though the spec is very clear about those kinds of short tags and the flags that affect them. PHP developers are absolutely terrified that some imaginary environment flag they have control over is going to brick their application, but are happy to bring in an entirely new templating language as a dependency instead. I'm sure Smarty was borne of a need, but I was never sure what it brought to the table except different tags for existing features.