Mixing HTML-generation and logic, no matter how nicely the languages mesh together, is still a mess. This is coming from someone who's done a few sizeable Common Lisp projects using tools like YACLML and CL-WHO, and then went back to using separate templates for HTML-generation. I'm not sure what Atwood is going on about in this article (probably he just felt he needed to write something, anything) -- separating out views/templates is not really much of a challange in my experience.