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Do developers really care whether a tool is written in JS rather than Ruby, or vice-versa? If you're running *nix it's pretty likely you have Ruby installed out of the box anyway.

There's nothing inherently tying you to Ruby anyhow, anyone could write a SASS parser in JavaScript. It's just that nobody has because there is no need for it.

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It's more convenient to be able to handle all dependencies through the same package manager.

Personally I prefer Scala and thus use SBT for most dependencies, requiring the user to use Bundler or NPM as well for just one dependency can get a bit annoying. In the case of SBT it actually does have some integration with NPM since it's used so much for client assets (and there is Trireme which is a pure-Java Node clone), but Ruby dependencies still mean adding one or two manual build steps.

The SASS team are writing one in JavaScript so they must feel there's a need: https://github.com/sass/node-sass

Node-sass isn't a JavaScript port of SASS, it's a Node.JS binding for libsass, the native (C) SASS compiler. The first paragraph of the readme tells you as much.

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