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Comment by mberning | Hacker News Reader

I love this kind of stuff, but at the same time, it presents a huge problem for software maintainability and building a scalable development team.

When I go to hire somebody it is a near certainty that they are very proficient with CSS. Sass? Probably less likely. For the sake of argument let's say I could find somebody proficient in Sass, what about all the other boutique technologies I have in my product?

At some point your product can devolve into an opaque and indecipherable hodgepodge of 'cool stuff'. Sometimes it really is better to keep things simple, even though you are causing yourself some personal pain.

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Have you actually looked at SCSS? This is a good start: http://sass-lang.com/. It's a superset of CSS. Very easy to learn.

Also, this "huge problem" you talk about is the same that people used to argue against Ruby/Rails with. Hey, everyone knows Java/Struts -- let's just keep it simple for hiring drone purposes!

Yes, I have looked at it, and I agree that it is very convenient that it is a superset of CSS. The problem still remains once I become deeply entrenched in SCSS it will have drifted pretty far from plain CSS.

The argument about rails vs struts may have been similar, but I don't think the comparison holds water. Web development frameworks are different than markup and stylesheet standards. We have standards that define HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc. There is no one standard that governs MVC frameworks.

So while I would expect any competent web developer to know HTML, CSS, and Javascript, I would not expect them to be competent in my particular choice of web framework since there is necessarily less standardization in that area.

My core point is that you need to exercise some caution before jumping into all these different technologies with both feet. There are considerations that extend beyond your personal coding pleasure.

Edit:

Also, my point was not to argue against one single technology. I am arguing against building an application with 20 different gee-whiz packages that causes a nightmare when training new developers.

It is an effective way to make sure you can never be fired from your current job though.

I'm in agreement. I'm already 10x faster with HTML and CSS so it defeats the point switching to an abstraction language such as Haml or Sass.

try haml for two weeks, you will not go back.

The CSS person doesn't need to know Sass in order for the project to benefit from it. At the very least, you could just dump the CSS in an .scss file and just use the automatic output formatting feature.

In my current project I take it a step further. I get the CSS from a designer, dump it in an scss partial, include that partial in the main sass/scss file where I then override and add styles. That way I can keep their CSS versioned and untouched while being able to automatically combine it with additional styles into a compressed CSS file.

The point is that there are plenty of ways Sass is incredibly useful even if the main CSS person doesn't work with it directly.

Obviously Coffeescript is a little different, but the advantage is that a Javascript developer is a programmer and it's not an unreasonable expectation for them to be able to get up to speed on Coffeescript.

It really doesn't take much to gain basic proficiency with SASS, as long as you know how to use the tab and delete keys (or the sass-convert tool).

With SCSS it's even easier, just rename the file and refactor it later if you're feeling lazy.

On a practical note, I've subcontracted out design work before and convinced (strongarmed) the designer to learn SASS. They're usually pretty happy about it.

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