Battle of the CSS Preprocessors

I love front end dev with a crazy passion, and I spend a lot of time thinking about and using CSS preprocessors. I’ve even been writing one myself just to better understand the implementation (and to teach myself about compilers - I’ve never taken a CS class in my life). I’ve written a large and extensive framework using sass that’s something of a mix between compass and twitter bootstrap. There are thousands of lines of pure sass, and the logic is so complex that I’ve even had a little trouble porting it out to javascript.

Needless to say, I’m very opinionated about css preprocessors, and whenever I see someone doing front end dev and not using one, it makes me cringe. The time they save you is so absurdly much more than the time it will take you to learn how to use their common-sense rules that I would seriously doubt the skills of anyone who calls themselves a front end dev and doesn’t use one. But with a number of preprocessors out there, I see a lot of confusion over which one is the ‘best’, especially for those just starting to learn. In this article, I’ll go over each of the major preprocessors in gritty detail, trying to be balanced in the pros and cons so that you can choose for yourself.

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On writing clear code

I have been using ruby, python, and javascript since I first learned to program. In many ways, these languages are quite similar. Well, javascript has a bit more syntax I suppose, but I have been using coffeescript almost exclusively these days which evens everything out a lot more. I immediately fell in love with the simplicity and clarity that comes with ruby, python, and coffeescript. The way I write code reads nearly like english, and everything comes out very neat and concise, and DRY.

So it may not come as a surprise that when I recently started studying Objective C, I was rather disgusted. The extra seemingly unnecessary syntax, the excruciatingly long method names, and the tendency for verbose to prevail over clean and concise just made me sad. But in the interest of learning new things, I pushed on. As I’ve made my way through the fantastic Big Nerd Ranch Guide to iOS Programming, I’ve been educated on Objective C culture and conventions, Apple’s API structure, and how everything fits together. Initilly it was very frustrating to me looking at the verbosity of the code and I asked myself over and over “why would anyone do this to themselves?!”, but over time I came to accept and understand it (although I still don’t prefer it). The reasons that resonated with me most were run speed and code clarity.

Since this is such a deep subject, I’m only going to go over code clarity in this article - I’ll write another one about run speed and it’s relation to language syntax, something I’ve been thinking about more and more since I started studying compilers.

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