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Comment by mmastrac | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me vaguely of what Coffeescript does for Javascript (http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/). It's a nicer, more modern syntax than the underlying language.

The killer is that they both require a compile to make it usable by a web browser. It would be far nicer if the compilers were written in JS and processed the languages dynamically.

The final compile before deployment can still happen via command-line tool, but this lets developers work in a simple edit-save-refresh environment.

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I believe that if you use Compass, it has a command line utility that watches for changes and then compiles the appropriate files automatically when changes occur. This makes your workflow similar to working with css where you have refresh to see your changes.

See documentation for more detail: http://wiki.github.com/chriseppstein/compass/command-line-to...

Future versions of sass will support this without 'having' to use Compass.

Or even better, a server-side module or component that Apache sends all .sass files to, and it outputs css.

For development I like to use Serve: http://github.com/jlong/serve

Sounds like a job for Rack, too.

We're a django shop and that's essentially what we do. We already use the django template engine in our javascript/css files (primarily for URL generation, but it's grown to be several other things). We plugged in Sass and it's been great.

The development servers passes CSS files through the django template engine and Sass every time it's served. In production we do it just during deployment. Thus what sits on our CDN is the end result. From a developers pesrpective your always editing the 'source' file not the 'compiled' version.

It's seamless and works great.

It's in the works. If all goes well, hopefully the CoffeeScript-in-CoffeeScript compiler will become the mainline:

http://github.com/creationix/coffeepot

Here's a link to Tim's alpha, which is able to parse a limited subset of CoffeeScript (we need to figure out what to do with left-recursive rules):

http://static.creationix.com/coffeepot/test/browser.html

I use Less and just run the lessc tool in --watch mode. A beat after I save the .less file, the .css file is updated.

Exactly. I can't even imagine the awkwardness of having to compile CSS. The advantage of CSS as a text file is speed.

Um, tools like Compass, Serve, and the Rails plugin totally remove any awkwardness.

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