Yup. Unfortunate indeed. It's 2023 and there is jinja, liquid, moustache and then some. Nothing extraordinary. Nothing truly cross language. I think that if t

Yup. Unfortunate indeed. It's 2023 and there is jinja, liquid, moustache and then some. Nothing extraordinary. Nothing truly cross language. I think that if the dice fell just slightly different, PHP could have taken that niche. Be the best templating language that has bindings to all major languages. It was really good at arrays, but then piled objects, hashmaps and more on top of these arrays. It had very good and broad string manipulation std functions. But the it piled SQL on top of that. Imagine if instead of mysql_real_escape it had focused on (nested) caching. Or if instead of the umpteenth mediocre OOP class inheritance it introduced template partials as objects to be defined. If, instead of clumsy form handling, it had the world's fasted serialization (to xml, html, JSON etc). Instead of csv parsers, it offered the best stdlib for rendering data. And so on.