Getting functional programming from PHP and Smarty are two very different things. I don't know how people shoehorning PHP into the functional paradigm is an example of the inner platform effect. I could see where it fits with Smarty but in defense of pretty much all PHP templating engines, they really are helpful despite mimicking native functionality. If you work with someone who is a front-end only person they'll appreciate being able to get up and running with Smarty quickly as its similar to templating languages for most other languages and you'll be happy not to have straight up PHP code in your HTML. Granted, the PHP does what the Smarty tags do but the cleanliness of the code really does make a noticeable difference and Skarty tags are far easier to pick out than PHP tags within HTML. So it really isn't all about the functionality there which is why I think your argument is weak.
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