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Comment by lemevi | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad they're supporting Bootstrap 3. The switch to Sass is unfortunate. I never had a problem with compile times and being able to pick and choose the bootstrap I needed in my own less build was really nice. I don't think I'll be using newer versions of Bootstrap. Once they stop supporting 3 I think I'll move on to a new CSS framework. I just think they shouldn't change builds like this on frameworks that are already widely used. I'm sure Sass developers were making use of Compass or other Sass frameworks if they needed to integrate the framework with their own builds.

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Switching to sass this late in the game is crazy and deeply pointless. Sass mafia got to them, I guess.

If you're used to Less, Sass won't feel that much different. Why don't you give it a try?

If you are using Less, why bother with Sass, since it isn't that much different?

NB: It's their project, they can do whatever they want, and I'm extremely thankful to everyone who has contributed to what I consider the most important project for web usability in the last decade. But I still view this as a deeply pointless change that will cause lots of unnecessary pain.

"Lots of unnecessary pain" -- such as?

I don't know, I never really liked Less and never understood why they picked it over Sass in the first place. In Less everything looks quite slick until you start doing loops, loops are just looking terrible (you can have a look at the documentation here: http://lesscss.org/features/#loops-feature). Since having loops is a big advantage of having a preprocessor, I never understood why Less was so popular.

Less was CSS compatible before Sass was, that's why I started using it. I really haven't ever had the need for loops. Less is also widely supported by all kinds of build tools, editors, IDE plugins etc. There's no searching for the wrong kind of Less as there would be for Sass since from what I understand there are two different types of Sass (Sass and SCSS).

I find it way easier to install less with node & npm, than it is to setup ruby & sass. If I'm developing with a "mean" stack, its kind of a nuisance to have to set up ruby instead of just using something node based.

None of the bootstrap stuff works with Angular out of the box anyways, and I always thought it was very verbose. Honestly all I like was the grid system anyways, so I don't see much need to upgrade.

Ruby's not required. The article doesn't mention Ruby but it mentions libsass (why Ruby is no longer required):

"This is great because Sass tends to be more favorable by front-end developers. It also compiles faster thanks to Libsass."

https://github.com/sass/libsass

> This is great because Sass tends to be more favorable by front-end developers

I don't understand what this mangled sentence means. How do they know what's favorable to front-end developers? Nobody asked me what I think. They did a valid random sample?

You know, they could always check relative watchers and other marks on GitHub for example.

Doesn't have to be an exact science. How do we know Knockout is less popular than Angular? And yet, we do.

https://github.com/less/less.js

12k stars, yeah throw it out, it's done.

https://github.com/sass/sass

6k stars, definitely more popular, if less stars means more popular. Obviously more front-end developers love sass! The evidence has spoken.

I didn't speak for any of them, so the sarcasm doesn't apply to me. Actually I've only ever used LESS.

That said, don't be so quick to just what's popular just by the relative size of the numbers. I'd also check which had a headstart and by what margin.

A 3 year project with 12k stars for example is not necessarily more popular NOW than a 1 year project with 6k stars.

That's why I advocated for several metrics.

You can use LibSass which is written in C++, to avoid the Ruby dependencies. https://github.com/sass/libsass

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