Hacker News Reader

Comment by malandrew | Hacker News Reader

Question #1: Why didn't Google decide to instead contribute to Less or Sass, instead of coming up with something new?

Question #2: Why did Google come out with their own solution that has matured in the vacuum instead of involving the community earlier on? This approach at best fails and at worst fragments the market further.

Observation #1: When there are two very established solutions in the market, Sass and Less, you need to point out why these two come up short and why you are coming out with something new. Simply stating "we have a Google version of the tools you already use with the same feature set" isn't a very compelling sales pitch.

View on HN

Your questions aren't a response to reality. Google has these tools that they use internally. They can either work to release them publicly, or not. I'd prefer they do.

Well, to be fair to Google, this looks very similar to the CssResource mechanism that has been in GWT for a while now, with the addition of mixins. If this is an evolution of the GWT version it's likely to be fairly mature "out of the gate".

Why didn't Google decide to instead contribute to Less or Sass

I'll see you and raise: why didn't Less contribute to Sass? ;-)

I don't see either question as being a problem in real life. You're going to have to have the build tools installed for any substantial web project you work on, and it's going to be less, sass, uglifyjs, closure, yuicompressor, the one I use that you've never heard of, or something else. Exactly which tools used is not particularly important.

And if you look at the Closure Stylesheets docs, it takes about 10 seconds (literally) to get it, if you're already familiar with similar systems. And if you're not familiar with them, you're riding the learning curve no matter what system you choose.

Finally, as to the observation, the argument is extremely compelling if you are deciding which toolset to use on your new project. Should I use Closure + Sass? Or should I use Closure? What do Less and Sass bring to the table that Closure does not?

(I'm not badmouthing these fine projects, and would not fault people for using any of them.)

> When there are two very established solutions in the market, Sass and Less, you need to point out why these two come up short and why you are coming out with something new. Simply stating "we have a Google version of the tools you already use with the same feature set" isn't a very compelling sales pitch.

You need to understand that when an announcement like this is made, the development behind it happened over the course of years.

It isn't as if a few days before the announcement blog post is linked on HN, somebody made the decision "we can use Less, or Sass, or write our own. Screw those guys, let's write our own and release it open source!"

Next question: Why now? If this was being worked on for several years, why wasn't it released much sooner?

I have nothing against projects coming from Google. I'm all in favor of it. However I think Google acts as a much better open-source citizen when it adopts a posture like it has with HTML5. With HTML5, Google got involved early and publicly and one of their employees works as a benevolent dictator, which in the case of HTML5 is Ian Hixie.

When a project is released from some company, with no real defined ownership in the form of one human being or a small team at that company, it is a far less compelling project to get involved with, and the likelihood of a community being formed around it is low.

> Why now? If this was being worked on for several years, why wasn't it released much sooner?

Actually, the relevant question is "why at all?"

Google, like most companies, has lots of unreleased internal tools that others would find useful/have built for themselves.

I agree, I feel like they did the same thing with Dart which, imo, addressed the same problems that Coffeescript has already addressed.

Dart doesn't add much in the way of syntactic-sugar which is the only problem addressed by CoffeeScript.

I'm glad they did - if for nothing else because I find the Coffeescript syntax obnoxious to the extreme.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com