My most frustrating experience with Hugo is their template language and lack of clear explanations, often waiving away any complexities as, “They’re just Go templates.” Fair enough, but the docs make no attempt to explain how scoping works, how variables can be applied to partials, or even how to construct a simple for-loop. There’s an answer for each of these problems but implementing a full solution requires scouring through the Go docs and Hugo’s own forums for a complete and pragmatic solution.

I had a heck of a time with Hugo’s concept of “Scratch” while generating a breadcrumb navigation. Combined with a JSON schema, Google will include these crumb segments in search results. But much like Handlebars, Go template expressions aren’t REPL friendly, and a the learning experience involves a lot of refreshing and debug output just to get a clue as to how things work.

Personally, this has bitten me with every “stringly” typed template language. IDE’s have little information to work with, and much like playing a game of Wordle, you’re left to fill in the blanks — one line at a time.