In my time with PHP, I never found a PHP templating language better or more effective than using PHP itself. At the time, the big ones were Smarty and Twig; both are stump-dumb tools designed to make easy things annoying and hard things impossible.
Emitting HTML is no different from any other functional programming task. State in, HTML out. (You had to be a little clever because you had to ob_start/ob_get_buffers/ob_end, but whatever. Still better than the alternatives.)
>both are stump-dumb tools designed to make easy things annoying and hard things impossible.
What hard things, specifically? I've used Twig a lot and never found it to get in the way of anything else I was trying to do.
>You had to be a little clever because you had to ob_start/ob_get_buffers/ob_end, but whatever.
By the time you have some general abstraction to push "state" into and get "HTML" out of, and deal with output buffering, header management, etc, you've started building an ad-hoc framework.
It's been a while, but I found Twig (and most mustachealikes) just super confining. I don't want to go write a function to transform my state and then expose it to Twig, I want to write a function. (They are pure functions, of course, because...well, competence, y'know?) Just stuff like that. It all gets built to PHP, but with limiters I don't need and (IME) teams that understand functional (in the pure-function sense, not the typeclasses-and-shitting-on-people-who-don't-write-Haskell sense) programming don't either.
> By the time you have some general abstraction
Sure. It's about a dozen lines long. And the language is the actual language I'm working with, not something that needs its own parser to give me less functionality in the spirit of mollyguarding on behalf of people who make mistakes of classes I categorically refuse to allow in my systems. (Please don't mistake this as me saying "I don't write bugs." I write many, many bugs. But I structure programs such that some bugs are very, very hard not to make obvious and to avoid.)
For similar reasons, this is why almost all of my web stuff these days uses a Node backend and a React/JSX or React Native frontend. Consistency across the whole thing, buttressed by tools that encourage good practice without chopping you off at the knees.
>And the language is the actual language I'm working with, not something that needs its own parser to give me less functionality in the spirit of mollyguarding on behalf of people who make mistakes of classes I categorically refuse to allow in my systems.
Ok. But to be fair, Twig's parser is extensible, whereas PHP's isn't. And it lets you use array shorthand in PHP versions that don't support it (which is not as much of a problem as it used to be, but to me, more than worth never having to type "Array()" again.)
Have you tried the XHP functionality in Hack? It treats XML as objects and understands it in context (which is something PHP should do natively, but can't.) It seems to solve many of the footgun problems that PHP template languages do, within native code.
Emitting HTML is no different from any other functional programming task. State in, HTML out. (You had to be a little clever because you had to ob_start/ob_get_buffers/ob_end, but whatever. Still better than the alternatives.)