Stop doing templating languages

I think HTML templating languages like jinja2, handlebars and go templates are the wrong solution. If what you are doing makes you reach for these tools, consider using a general programming language instead. HTML templating languages limit you to the subset of general programming patterns the language author has chosen to implement.

You don't have to do a lot of templating before thinking to yourself:

It would be nice to extract this section and use it in all these other places without repeating myself too much.

—A developer creating a site using an HTML templating language, probably

I hope the templating language you picked supports arbitrary user-defined snippets with the capacity to pass arguments. If you were using a normal language, you would use a regular function and move on.

This is mostly a public reminder to myself because I foolishly once thought writing a templating language was a good idea. I learned a lot in the process though, so I have no regrets. Once I got the basics working, I quickly realized that to make it useful, you basically have to implement variables, functions, arguments, loops etc... And at that point, why not just use an existing language?