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Comment by wvenable | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what your point is! Your original comment about x86 doesn't even make sense -- most people don't know x86 assembler! However, all web designers know CSS. Nearly all web developers know CSS. That's what makes it universal! It's not about how low-level it is.

We recently had to fire a design team and are in the process of moving to a different team. If all the styles were in SASS, I'd have a much bigger problem.

Even something like LessCSS has a much smaller learning curve because it looks like CSS. You can use it much more minimally (using only variables, for example) and get a small benefit with a small learning curve. Think of how many of those 50 other languages look like C.

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It really seems like you don't understand how Sass works, or at least haven't actually run it. If anything, Sass layers more gracefully than C does over x86, since compiler-generated x86 is incomprehensible, and Sass-generated CSS is probably more readable than what a typical designer produces. Sass also promotes CSS best practices, in part by automating them, and in part by providing syntactic sugar for them.

If your designers can't grok Sass, you do what every professional team using template languages has always done; you back-and-forth with the designer in CSS/HTML, and you convert final comps to templates. Designers by and large don't speak Haml, Erb, Clearsilver, or Cheetarah (or Mum-raah or whatever Django calls it) either.

The designers produce the CSS, I don't. In most cases, they use their fancy tools to produce it. If they're not using SASS, what's the advantage to me? Why would I convert their CSS to SASS to get the same result in the end?

Templates are a different story -- that's where the design and the functionality meet. I do convert the final comps to templates and if necessary the templates back into static code to repeat the process (rarely necessary, but it happens). This is a necessary evil. Why would I want to perpetuate that evil in CSS as well?

You know what's funny: I know of several design firms that are using sass to generate their css and they deliver the generated CSS to their client without ever telling them that they used sass to make their development process faster.

If they had given you their Sass code, you would be empowered to make design changes much more easily that you could have with CSS. If I were you, I'd be demanding that my designers use it ;-)

Funny thing about Hacker News, where the guy who wrote Compass gets modded down below the guy criticizing Sass without ever having once used it.

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