Thread:Tupka217/@comment--20140610154527/@comment--20140611142521

You general impression of Lua is correct, but I honestly wouldn't call it round-about. It's essentially the same thing we do with wikitext when the "main" template page calls numerous other subtemplates. You could, of course, invoke the Lua module directly on a page like you would a template, but the wikitext would be quite different for the user base. Hence, this is why it makes sense to simply change the template than trying to bot change the thousands of pages that transclude that template.

The benefit of the redundant system on those two Marvel templates is that the Lua language is programmed to understand switches natively. In MediaWiki, every time you invoke a #switch statement the processor is literally running logic on every single condition of the statement before executing. Lua is much smarter at knowing what code is meant to run when.