I find many of today's template languages frustrating and hard to work with. Originally, I simply wanted to perform on-the-fly variable substitution, but as my needs grew, so did the idea for TPT. For a time, I used the PML language, but that was written entirely in Perl and lost the support of its creator.

Though I initially only intended to use TPT for generating HTML responses for CGI scripts, it was quickly adopted by the clo++ project for C++ code generation, and I have since used it for generating E-mail, Makefiles, and C source code as well.