I agree that it’s some cool and fun to use stuff. but I doubt using it in a large real world project with numerous team members with different skill levels keeping things simple worth those more characters!
I have written a first edition of Yii2-tale-jade which is a Jade renderer for Yii2 using the Tale Jade for PHP library.
The syntax is slightly cleaner than MtHaml, and you can actually debug the templates easily, even though you are not shown the source but the compiled php file.
However, the extension is still in the early stages.
However, I really believe that a cleaner syntax leads to cleaner code and thus less room for error.
First: the syntax for Tale Jade is Jade and PHP.
PHP you already know.
And Jade is simply short-hand HTML and you know that you know that.
I am so lazy that I am willing to spend weeks of hard work so that I don’t have to do all that tedious typing!
If you take a look at yii2-tale-jade and the syntax you will see that it really just is html tags and good old PHP.
There are no ugly php start and end tags and no brackets, not even curly ones (except in the PHP code, obviously).
If you are really lazy, you can just include a plain PHP file in the Tale-Jade templates and call it the day.
Edit: My primary reason for using a template language with Yii/PHP right now is not so much for the templating features, but for cleanliness / reduced typing.
I might go nuts later with Jade blocks and mixins - I probably will! but for now the main motivation is to be able to work Emmet-like.