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Comment by creativityhurts | Hacker News Reader

LESS became popular thanks to Twitter Bootrstrap and to the fact that you don't need Ruby to use it, which is a big plus for Windows users.

I use them both on daily basis, SCSS & Compass for a Sencha Touch project and LESS & Bootstrap for web dev work, along side with CodeKit to compile them and the major difference that I see is the speed of compiling. The projects I work on are both pretty large and with many .scss/.less files but LESS compiles way faster for me and this is a big plus.

Also, LESS is pretty useful for rapid prototyping since you can use the less.js and skip the compiling part altogether.

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> you don't need Ruby to use it, which is a big plus for Windows users

Not just. It's a plus for someone who already uses CoffeeScript in a Django project and don't want to bring in another huge piece of infrastructure as a dependency.

I use SASS on Windows with no issues and it was rather easy to get up and running. Granted it did require the installation of Ruby of which I only use it for this, but that's a small price to pay.

Indeed. IMHO the concerns expressed by some here about relying on Ruby are greatly exaggerated.

For anyone who is curious, the steps required to use SASS on Windows are something like:

1. Download RubyInstaller from rubyinstaller.org and run it. (This is a self-contained Windows installer for Ruby and the related tools/documentation.)

2. Run "gem install sass" at a command prompt. (This downloads and installs SASS itself, including SCSS.)

Personally, I'd love it if Ninite picked Ruby up as an option, because I already install many other tools that way in a single step. However, installing Ruby manually is no harder than installing any other piece of Windows software you download, and installing SASS on top is literally a one-liner.

Unless you're developing on a relatively old and low-powered system, I don't see any downside to having the extra software installed either: it's just another tool, occupying a few MB of hard drive and a few characters in your PATH, and IME it's perfectly friendly toward development toolchains for other languages.

Your two-part explanation is accurate. The Sass team was nice enough to even point you to RubyInstaller right there on their download page.

Mindscape has a Visual Studio extension called "Web Workbench" that makes installing and using SASS really easy (as well as LESS and CoffeeScript). I installed via NuGet and I don't remember ever having to leave Visual Studio. The installer took care of all the dependencies and I was up and running right away.

> you don't need Ruby to use it, which is a big plus for Windows users.

Not only that, but if you are minifiying Javascript some of the best minifiers are built with node, so its one less language/dependency if you're not already using ruby.

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