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

[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"...

[Taylor Love]

You may as well ask if people still use for loops anymore. Are you kidding me? I made an account just to comment on this. YES it is still useful.

[Khalil Drissi]

I think if we can reduce another tool to simply the dev process we should. personally I'm always on the watch for reducing my toolchain...I would say today's css native features get the job done perfectly, I see no reason adding more complications to the dev process.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Chris DeMars]

Scss for the win! I use it all the time. Sass on the other hand....meh.

[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...

[yi]

I am still using it, combined with css module. It's amazing.