Comment by lloeki
> I really wanted the templates to just be nix functions
This feels like Ruby template engines like haml† and slim†† a lot, or the various xml builders††† too
† https://github.com/haml/haml
†† https://slim-template.github.io
††† https://nokogiri.org/rdoc/Nokogiri/XML/Builder.html#class-No...
Groovy does something similar with MarkupTemplateEngine; I don't super care for it there either, at least as a mechanism for generating full webpages:
https://docs.groovy-lang.org/docs/groovy-2.5.3/html/document...
It can make a lot more sense as a way to prepare a smaller snippet of XML though, for example an xunit reponse.