Is anyone really using SASS anymore?

OK, bit of a hot title, of course people are, hell I'm still using it. But, I had a question from a mentee the other day about 'what is SASS?' and 'what is the difference between SASS and CSS?'.

Of course, I answered those, but it got me thinking about the relevance of SASS in today's front end workflow and tooling...

CSS itself has given us native solutions to some of the problems SASS originally solved (e.g. variables), and we've got so many options for development these days with Styled Components in React, Tailwind CSS, CSS-in-JS, etc. and dynamic imports are coming in JS.

So my questions are this:

• Do you think SASS is losing relevance or usefulness in today's landscape?
• Are you still using it? Why? Why not?
• What other tools do you prefer or have started adopting in SASS's place?
• Do you have any tips, tricks or advice on being productive with modern CSS?

Comments

[@lukeocodes 🕹👨‍💻]

I've been using Tailwind along with PostCSS and it's made me really love not using SASS.

[Rob Kendal {{☕}}]

I'm just discovering Tailwind and I must admit I didn't get it at first, but it's very powerful and I'm loving it the more I use it :D

[@lukeocodes 🕹👨‍💻]

You can end up with class soup while making your own components out of it, but you can use PostCSS
(I do in Vue) to create semantic classes for each component, making your components tidier!

[@lukeocodes 🕹👨‍💻]

and shameless plug, I wrote a little post on getting tailwind working quickly in vue

Using Tailwind CSS with Vue.js

@lukeocodes 🕹👨‍💻 ・ Mar 19 '20 ・ 6 min read

#vue #javascript #beginners

[Rob Kendal {{☕}}]

Well I'm going to check that bad boy out :D

[Pacharapol Withayasakpunt]

I used Tailwind only for a few days, and it feels like Bootstrap or Bulma as well, but more fully featured and far more customizable.

I decided to quit, as it is a dependency as well. I prefer Vue SFC with scoped SCSS instead; but this is limited to SFC like Vue or Svelte.

Even when I use Gatsby or React, I prefer @emotion as inline styles, not as styled components, but maybe I am not a proper user of React.

[Abhinav Kulshreshtha]

• I don't think sass will lose it relevance any time soon. Even in today's landscape. Recent css features are cool but using them is cumbersome compared to what sass have. And compiling scss to generate so called CSS4 file is best of both world. Take a read on this article codepen.io/jakealbaugh/post/css4-v.... This article and its update demonstrate how we can utilize best of modern css features while still having coding convenience of scss.

• I am still using scss because I hate using large css framework. Using scss gives me benefit of having a semi-actual programming language to create optimised css for the site. I was also inspired by 2014 talk from Heydon Pickering for a clean and minimal css approach.

• I have used tailwind with sass for quick prototyping. But for production, I would still keep sass ui project.

• My tip is to watch "heydon pickering | effortless style 2014". It will change the way you approach styling. Also Blogs on codepen are great resource. My fav author is Jake Albaugh and Chris Coyier

[Pacharapol Withayasakpunt]

I am using SCSS. I would avoid indented syntaxes, as in SASS, if possible. Also SCSS is more similar to CSS.

SCSS allows me to use nested CSS and CSS variables. Well, I am not sure about caniuse.com/#feat=css-variables

There is also LESS and Stylus.

IMO, you should use at least post-CSS, to ensure compatibility.

For wholly web browser environment (no Node, no OS), I like stylis.js.

[Craig Johnson]

I prefer CSS Variables. I learned LESS and hadn't tried SASS. To each their own.

When I was learning front-end, many tutorials had some CSS but mostly Bootstrap 3, or Bulma, or Materialize-CSS, etc. It got confusing and limited my understanding of CSS.

I once read: "Frameworks come and go. If you want to do front-end, you need to have a solid understanding of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript." I think that was from the Odin Project?

I still go over tutorials and if they used SASS, I just use CSS Variables.

[mememe]

• I don't think it will lose its relevance any time soon.

• I am loving Sass(SCSS) more than ever. Namespacing is really helpful when working with it. It has also helped 'error'-ing when compiling so that I won't miss some typos.

• None. I haven't any reason to move yet. If there's a chance, maybe.

[Paulius Varna]

I hate SASS.
I hate libs using SASS.
Can you move on already?
Can you make it any harder for anyone else to use your code?
Why do you need to compile styles in 2020?
Why does the compiler not work with my OS and Node version from first try in 95% of times?

[Rob Kendal {{☕}}]

lol, so I'm guessing.....not a fan?

[Paulius Varna]

It's not like I actually hate SASS.
I don't like the buggy compiler.
And I don't see any point of using SASS apart from importing some SASS.

[Daniel Schulz]

Of course.
I like writing style systems instead of using the atomic css approach of Tailwind and co.
Sass (or scss in my case) helps me with three major points

• Nesting. I write my styles in between BEM and SMACSS. Nesting helps me with namespacing.
• Mixins. Those are awesome for helper classes that you may or may not need. Mixins don't get rendered by default if the stylesheet doesn't require it. It allows me to tree shake a library of helpers. I used to use sass-variables for everything too, but phased that out in favor for custom properties.
• component structure. Helps me stay sane, when every component has its own file. But bundling everything up is necessary to improve the network waterfall. That's something CSS-imports can't do.

I think sass is losing relevance, but for the wrong reasons. Native css is growing and the working group is discussing things like native nesting. That would be my main reason to abandon sass for just native css.
However it's mostly losing relevance because of Utility-first frameworks. I don't believe those are the answer to complex style systems, since they're aiming to reduce relationships between elements to zero. Those can be very powerful, if wielded with care.

[Bernard Baker]

I agree with this comment. It does provide improvements to structure CSS. And namespaces are good as well.

Vue which has scoped styling is good.

React in the other hand, doesn't. But I'm not going into Styled Components are anything like that.

[Adrian Sandu]

I think that Sass will remain relevant as long as there are major frameworks that use it. The move that Bootstrap did from Less to Sass practically buried the first one and gave a big boost to the second one.

I am using both Less and Sass because many client projects run on legacy codebases and were developed during a time when Less was more mainstream (again, due to Bootstrap). I never got to the point where I was a power user, but currently, I find it less convenient to write only vanilla CSS.

[Calum James]

Variables in CSS are starting to make Sass and similar preprocessors less necessary, but the nesting is invaluable in my view, so I don’t think it should be deemed a dead technology.

In React I use Styled Components because I love making single-file components, but I’d use Sass if I were making single-file components in Vue or if I were using some other frameworks.

What I’m currently interested in is how we can share styling across native mobile apps and web apps. Styled Components seems like it could help with that, but I haven’t seen anything that would make Sass viable for that, so that’s where it may fall down.

[Rob Kendal {{☕}}]

I love nesting, it's my favourite part of Sass/SCSS (tbh I don't gel with Sass, but I'm a big SCSS user)! I wish I could get onboard with the styled components train but it irritates my old-school 'separation of concerns' personage....and I know, I know, we're already mixing that water with HTML inside JS....but humans gonna human...

[SorinGFS]

I really really hate SASS! This is because SASS simply erased months of my life!
At this point you may think: oh, poor guy, coding is not for everyone, but don't get me wrong: I have bult a very complex frontend framework... using SASS. I didn't know about tailwind at that time, and when I learned about it... it was too late to change all my code base . So, my advice for anyone trying to decide what to use is: do not use SASS!
When someone starts a project to learn web developement it may think SASS is a beautifull way to combine classes, to nest some rules, and so on... But as the project gows the problems starts to arrise! Some of the problems are:

• file referencing system, SASS finally realized their @import problem and now they switch to @use encouraging ppl to convert their old code into it... but guess what: most of the time is impossible!
• insane amount of bugs, so many that they splitted the libs into multiple variatons to get rid of their old history, but even the new variations contains huge amout of bugs
• arbitrarry author code changes, eg. if some css rules doesn't match their browser compatibility policy they simply just replace it with what they think is good. Please read the mind bending SASS issue469, where they banned me for my opinnions! :))) I bet not many SASS users know that their code is actually changed in the output!
• data types. It would probably take thousands of lines to write about illogical sass data types which in fact are all.. strings. And this is because SASS itself is just a text proccessor, not a language as they claim! The SASS creators should have at least known that one language is not written in another language!

So, what choice do we have to avoid SASS? Well, tailwind is a solution, but in principle the problem can be concluded at the execution of preprocessing in javascript. Using nodejs file referencing system we can load any css file into javascript as text, then we can proccess that text using javascript functions and finally output the result into css files. We really don't need any of SASS "intelligence"...