Lately there has been a rise in the usage of CSS preprocessors such as LESS and SASS, which makes sense given the simultaneous increase of CSS3 usage. I’ve frequently argued with fellow front-end web developers about whether they should be used or not and I decided to finally put my thoughts in writing.
To start, I can fully understand the advantage of using such preprocessors over vanilla CSS3. I hate listing all the vendor prefixes, and not being able to use variables, mixins or nesting just like the next web developer. All this syntactic sugar can simplify your workflow by a great deal and make writing CSS3 incredibly fun. However, I still refrain from using them, and I’ll explain why below.