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Yep. It probably wouldn't be hard to modify this workflow to use Less or Stylus instead so that you don't need Ruby.

Might be able to use the Sassc - https://github.com/hcatlin/sassc lib too. There are several wrappers for it too, like this one for node https://github.com/andrew/node-sass

I just submitted a pr for less support, it will still require ruby as the premailer gem is still used to send the email out.