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Comment by cultureulterior | Hacker News Reader

What the heck is less?

The CSS preprocessor that lost the popularity race to Sass.

There are some reasons for using one or the other depending on your needs. Ruby vs. JS, for one.

I disagree. I used to use LESS since I could use node, but quickly realized it's inferior to the Sass/Compass combo. 99.9% of the servers that you are able to run node.js on will also allow you to install/run Ruby. What are the other reasons that I'm missing?

I'm curious about what makes Sass/Compass superior to LESS?

A simple example...

    // Less
    .rounded-corners (@radius: 5px) {
        -webkit-border-radius: @radius;
        -moz-border-radius: @radius;
        -ms-border-radius: @radius;
        -o-border-radius: @radius;
        border-radius: @radius;
    }

    // Sass + Compass
    .rounded-corners {
        // All vendor prefixes are generated for you
        @include border-radius(5px); 
    }

I'm sure there are plugins for Less that can accomplish the same. I just grabbed this code from the Less homepage.

Another thing... Sass has much nicer control flow (if/else, while, for) that can create very powerful mixins.

I think that Less has actually won the popularity race thanks to Bootstrap, a nicer website/docs, and front end devs not wanting to learn how to install Ruby. I think it's unfortunate because Sass is technically superior, imo.

http://cdn.css-tricks.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Charts-...

(Could be skewed by the audience participating in the poll, of course.)

Correct, LESS is all I use right now because of Bootstrap. I don't get it though, LESS is open source. If it's so inferior, why aren't there more pull requests to make it better?

I'd imagine it's because people who aren't satisfied with Less are using/contributing to Sass instead... and vice versa. ;)

There are also big differences in design philosophy. I love the if/else, while, and for options that Sass provides, but Less has chosen to forgo that for (imo) a clunkier syntax. Things like that are unlikely to change.

> Things like that are unlikely to change.

Breaks my heart...

Does anyone else use Sass besides the Rail devs?

Foundation is based on SASS.

I'm not a Rails dev at all, but I do use Python, PHP, and now Grails with Sass.

I'm not a Rails guy and I use Sass exclusively. I agree with its design decisions and functionality more so than Less. I've found that most people who install and run Node for command line tools usually also have Ruby in their stack.

http://lesscss.org/

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