Rather, it's to protect them from having to code in complex programming language.

That argument is always brought up to defend template meta languages. But hey -

• complex stuff shouldn't be in a template anyways
• template developers themselves use a complex language
• template developers aren't exposed to the hard bits of perl

I wonder why "preventing them from being exposed to perl" should do them any good? or to perl, for that matter?

_($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                              /\_¯/(q    /
----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}