Notes

There used to be a time when Sass was priceless. It has been my go-to choice as well, and it has been so for ages. But CSS has come a long way – it now has custom properties, supports nesting, and will likely get conditions, functions, and even mixins soon. And it lives in a mature ecosystem with features such as CSS modules that help with code organization.

I wholeheartedly agree with Jeff’s conclusion there:

So what is my verdict — is it time to un-Sass?

Please don’t hate me, but my conclusion is: it depends.

I wouldn’t blindly jump into rewriting an existing, sizeable codebase from Sass to CSS. But for projects on the smaller side, and definitely for new projects, I believe CSS is already more than capable.

This post is music to my ears. It essentially conveys the same message I’ve been presenting in a talk called ‘Keep yourself DRY.’ We are obsessed with deduplicating code into abstractions, but abstractions often don’t age well:

Each new requirement made it slightly worse, but never quite bad enough to refactor. It’s death by a thousand parameters.

Having said that, it’s also quite difficult to design good abstractions from the beginning. As Matheus says:

The right time to abstract isn’t when you see duplication — it’s when you understand the pattern.

And if you do abstract early and only later a different pattern emerges, do not be afraid to break the abstraction down and put it back on the drawing board.