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Comment by ramesh31 | Hacker News Reader

>We've had the likes of HAML to simplify HTML, CoffeeScript to simplify JS, SASS to simplify CSS. These worked well as they optionally replaced a small part of the stack and took great care not to deviate too much from the underlying tech. They arguably had an acceptable cost/benefit ratio. The costs were little, as they should have been.

What's so wonderful about the web as a platform is that, over time, each of the technolgies you've mentioned were able to actually influence the evolution of the HTML, CSS, and JS specs respectively. To the point that now they are all completely obsolete. The web has come so far in the last 10 years it's insane. With a little bit of transpiling down from the latest features, you can now write pure vanilla html/css/js that would have required a dozen different libraries and frameworks back in the day. This, IMO, is what we should continue striving for.

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> With a little bit of transpiling down from the latest features, you can now write pure vanilla html/css/js that would have required a dozen different libraries and frameworks back in the day. This, IMO, is what we should continue striving for.

Agreed

> To the point that now they are all completely obsolete.

I _heavily_ disagree that SASS is completely obsolete.

>I _heavily_ disagree that SASS is completely obsolete

I'll die on this hill. PostCSS with transpilation from the future CSS spec has completely obliviated the need for SASS at this point. Everything it doesn't cover that SASS did (i.e mixins, for loops, if/else logic) were objectively bad things to be doing in your stylesheets; the entire point of CSS is to be completely declarative. With native css imports, variables, calc(), and nesting, there's nothing more you need at this point.

There are still plenty of reasons to use SASS. Especially if you need big, engineered stylesheets.

Are most people using PostCSS? Are a lot of front-end people married to JavaScript-specific tooling? Because Tailwind does all the same stuff and works anywhere.

I mean PostCSS is cool, but I don't see how it's actually better than alternative tools. It just makes CSS easier in one particular aspect, at the expense of others. Like pretty much all tools.

> It just makes CSS easier in one particular aspect, at the expense of others. Like pretty much all tools.

I agree, but what sets PostCSS apart from other tools is its forward compatibility. Which is a reason to opt for it for many people, including me.

At the end of the day most people will benefit from having vanilla CSS knowledge anyway regardless of any layer they prefer to use on top of it. SASS is such a layer as well as Tailwind. PostCSS is just tomorrow's CSS. It is to CSS what Babel is to Javascript. So using PostCSS instead of SASS is comparable to using Babel instead of for example CoffeeScript.

If one deems that tomorrow's CSS as it currently stands is advanced enough to handle "big, engineered stylesheets", then PostCSS may well be all they need. But I don't think there is a single right answer here.

> But I don't think there is a single right answer here.

Sounds like SASS isn't obsolete if that is the case. Saying something is obsolete implies there is _zero_ reason to use it over some other solution.

I personally think that it is not obsolete. I just happen to not prefer it.

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