SASS or LESS? What should you use?

Today I want to take a stab at the age-old question: SASS or LESS?

[neetishraj]

This video in 2lines, You, re welcome
1.learn HTML, CSS, and JS properly before jumping into CSS precompilers like Sass, Less, Stylus or Zade(never heard of it btw).
2.Sass seems popular professionaly, Less(second bcoz of Bootstrap) but BS ll soon shift to sass too, Zade is least popular.

[MarcHershey]

Edit: Skip to 4:04

Bro.. let me first tell you that if someone is searching "SASS or LESS" on youtube/google, they are not just now dipping their hands in web design. Stop telling me that I need to "walk before I run" and just get to the point of you explaining your opinions on SASS vs LESS. People here generally know what SASS and LESS are, they just either want to know the difference between the two, or want to know which is best to use in your opinion. Sorry but this aggravated me to sit here for 5 mins listening to you tell me I need to be an expert at HTML/CSS before getting into LESS/SASS. I haven't even got to the part of the video where the title is accurate. At this point, the video should be called "What is SASS/LESS"

[MartinChaov]

WARNING to other viewers. The guys just blabs incomprehensibly for around 10 min. No relevant information can be found here.

[veritas]

Again, agreed. The same thing goes for frameworks, like you said in another video of yours.
I talk from experience. When I started I was using bootstrap and foundation, and it  messed up my learning method, ending up stuck in the most basic of things.
I only used frameworks because I was so anxious to put my photoshop designs in the browser that I didn't want to learn proper html and css.
It was only until a year ago that I really understood what CSS positioning was all about.
Nowadays I'm able to code proper html & css, no preprocessors needed (even though I use them extensively).
So your message resonates 100%.
Lay the foundations and build on them.

[sanwil]

"People try to run before they walk." I love this line so much. This is the struggle that I've had since I've started in development and I'm finally getting over that mentality. It actually hindered me on certain things. I've finally started learning SASS and it is great for workflow on Large projects with multiple style sheets. Thank you for all that you do Travis!

[AntonKastritskiy]

I strongly agree with your point on walking and running. The world of web dev tools is enormous and it is so easy to loose yourself in trying to learn all newer techniques, libraries, tools etc. It is really important to highlight that what counts is what you produce rather than what tools you use. Thanks for such awesome video again, always a pleasure to watch. I also noticed that you shot this video in one cut and mad props for this, it's so cool that you are able to this!

[meowcus_]

I agree with this message 100%.  If you don't understand the foundation you are going to have a bad time when (not if) things go wrong and you need to debug the output.  I actually go so far to suggest that web developers learn the HTTP protocol as problems with requests and responses have been a thorn many times in my career.

[AbhiKhatri]

Yeah I agreed, This is very very very well known question in our dev community and all of our experienced devs always says "You don't really need a preprocessor". I used to love sass and it was pretty easy to write but my mentor Aaron Segal tell me not to use any frameworks and preprocessors unless you master your basic skillset so I go back to roots and write plain html, css and js. I find myself with much cleaner code and I have more control over it. I'd like to give same advice to all the people like me who's just starting out with their career.

[BryceStradling]

Sooo true. I tried jumping from basic javascript strait to coffeescript, and it couldn't have been worse. It became impossible to debug because I didn't know what I was looking for in the first place.Great vid as always Travis.

I personally use stylus, because it's an node module and not a gem. Using ruby on windows can be really chaotic sometimes, and is usually not worth the trouble. It also has a few features the others don't have, like globbing that I love.Stylus also is looser, excepting any punctuation, so I feel that it errors out on me less often. The next version of Sass will be apparently be available via NPM so maybe I'll switch back then. 

I've also been pretty dependent on jade for personal projects lately (coding emails with tables is significantly easier), but trying to mix it with handelbars for Ghost blogs or Jekyll has proven to be counter intuitive, and I'm sure its the same with Wordpress. If anyone has advice on how to better combine CMS software with jade, it'd be much appreciated. It speeds up my workflow to such an extent, I'm not really looking to abandon it.

[zatamite]

Thank you for saving me lots of time. I am certainly in the first category. I haven't looked at html since the late 80's. CSS didn't even exist back then. As far as animation goes I think we had <blink>.

[timebandit.]

Well, I always kept worring about those things, using the latest and coolest tools, reading about the new and best software, keeping up with the latest tutorials...untill yesterday, when I had a burnout, an information overload, keeping up with all those things kept me away from ACTUALLY coding and programming...and thinking that I was doing this for the last 6 months and after all this time I realised I started to forget those things because I was not putting them in PRACTICE, practicing those things is what makes you retain them better. Your video couldn' t come in a better time, thank you Travis, great man.

[stacihumphries]

I appreciate you taking the time to share this and greatly enjoy your other videos - you're pretty funny, thank you for that. I'm about to graduate with a degree in web and had never had any web experience before. I was in school for 3 years with no summer breaks and I've only brushed the surface. There weren't any classes or lectures on preprocessors, only talk amongst ourselves. Your videos are helping me to feel more comfortable about them, so thank you.

[fragileglass]

Most developers are introduced to Pre-Processors via a framework of a sort. Whether it's Bootstrap, Foundation or any package generated from Yeoman or Slush. These packages rely heavily on Pre-Preprocessors. This has been taking away the importance of the core features it generates which is CSS, HTML and JavaScript. Causing new developers to jump the proper learning order.

As for the learning curve, coding is like a signature, every developer has their own naming convention, project notation and file directory setup. When you get these packages, you're downloading someone else's programming habits. Unfortunately this results in frequent errors because you can't find the Color Variable, or understand how they coded a Grid Mixin or even know where to find them within the folder tree.

I've abandoned site frameworks altogether because of this. Now I really enjoy using Sass and Stylus. There are less errors because I know which folder I put things and remember all my silly ridiculous names for things.

[sanketss]

Hi Travis, you know i have watched a lot of your videos but i hadn't watched this one as i had already started using LESS for my needs. but you know this video was such an eye opener for me.

Your initial talk about learn the basic before you jump into the fancy stuff is valuable advice people just want to jump the gun and run before they can even walk. I wont disagree i am in the same boat. This video helped me answer a lot of question that i have been struggling with in the past few months. I will streamline my learning and start from scratch and get things right.

Thank you for this gem of advice.

[Eikon_FF]

Dude so cool! Thank you so much for creating such video that explained it the most simple way that I can understand. Double thumbs up!

[marble_wraith]

SASS and LESS have almost the exact same capabilities, to understand dev-preference it's useful to look at the history. The battle went as follows:

SASS appeared in 2007 as pretty much the first kid on the preprocessor block running natively on Ruby (which conveniently comes preinstalled on macs).

LESS appears in 2009 running natively on ruby and then ported to javscript, still buggy an too immature at this point.

By 2012/13 most of LESS's problems have been fixed and it has been ported to many different languages (JAVA, .Net, python, php) as a result compilations are a little more optimized.

At the same time node is gaining traction and devs were finding many uses for this lightweight way of running code i.e. reverse proxy's, servers, MEAN stack, etc. Also as mentioned Bootstrap (being the most popular framework around) was natively written in LESS. Of course there were other frameworks around in support of sass, zurb-foundation for example but they didn't have the twitter brandname behind them.

For some dev's however (primarily mac users) they still had no use for node as yet, thus SASS still remained in existence as the minority despite having slightly better features out-of-the-box and negligible compile times for individual-devs. SASS's community didn't sit idle during this period though, they noticed the faster compile times of LESS hence libsass came into existence.

Enter the task automation wars... grunt vs gulp... the one thing they both had in common was nodeJS. At this point regardless of OS (linux / mac / win) people had a reason to setup the nodeJS environment locally.

With most of the mac users switching from ruby to node the LESS vs SASS debate reached it's peak at which point it ultimately came down to a few points:
- syntax (sass users didn't wanna switch from $)
- featureset
- support (in existing frameworks such as bootstrap)

The result, SASS wins by a slight margin.

[steffenharnack]

Thanks again Travis! You made it all possible. Your videos on Html and CSS just got me hooked half a year ago. Since then I kept studying and learning new stuff almost every day. Before that it was always on and off. Just couldn't stay motivated. But with your advice and total awesomeness of teaching I managed to navigate myself through the very chaotic beginning of coding. And now, half a year later I am starting to feel really comfortable and begin to know my way around. Keep your great work up man! It's a pleasure listening and learning!

[ShaXCwalk]

Definitely need a follow up video of the actual question that needs to be answered. :/
I think many people who click on this know CSS enough and are ready for the next level which is using a preprocessor like SASS/SCSS or LESS. I'd be happy to see a follow up since this was all just a big lecture to go back to the basic before going further. Thank you.

[johnwpierce]

I did use bootstrap to get my start. It really helped me to understand html and css. Probably because once I gained a foundational understanding of responsive structure; things started falling into place. It's not enough to just get by; a good technician desperately needs to know the what, why, and how. It's somewhat comical and sad, I've been trying to teach myself html for 20 years.

Once I built my first site with bootstrap, somehow, with The Google's help, I discovered flexbox. So naturally I Youtubed that, lol. and found your videos. Which were/are very helpful. Thanks!

[Nowayjose-zr]

this is another amazing video. Along the lines with the video about div soup. I have run across more designers then not that rely to much on plugins and text editors features and can't do the basic fundamentals. The lack of fundamentals comes out in testing and whiteboard tests. As was stated most of your work doesn't usually these tools. Example a basic theme that's one page to show the client. They need to be quick and dirty as you usually have many examples and needs to be tweaked during a meeting. Utilizing all the tools etc slows that process down considerably.