I want to thank everyone who replied to my last post and told me everything that was wrong with Haml error messages. I think I’ve fixed everything that was mentioned there, but if something else comes up please let me know.

I was surprised to learn that most of the problems were with line number inaccuracies and the error not managing to bubble up through Rails properly. I was going to do a similar post for Sass, but since it doesn’t seem to have the same issues, I think I’ll skip it.

Instead, I thought we could do some brainstorming. Haml’s been missing an important bit of functionality for a while now. Although it’s powerful enough to express almost everything you can with plain XHTML, Haml isn’t good at not producing whitespace.

I love it when people rant about Haml and Sass. As wonderful as positive feedback is (and I love that, too), criticism is golden. Hearing what people hate about these programs is hands-down the best way to figure out how to improve them.

For example, people hated that Haml was so much slower than ERB. It’s not any more¹. People hated that it was so annoying to format whitespace-sensitive HTML elements like textarea and pre. This will “just work” as of the next major release.

Unfortunately, there’s one major issue I haven’t been able to fix. I’ve heard over and over again on blog posts and Twitter that people just can’t understand Haml’s and Sass’s error messages.