History of SASS
I am a student writing a short paper about SASS and have run into a bit of a black hole when it comes to the development of the language. Beyond a few archived blog posts, I can't find a whole lot about the conceptualization or development of the language. Would you have any pointers toward that information? I'm curious about how the idea for the preprocessor came up and how the development team came together.
I guess there isn't much about this up anywhere particularly easy to find, is there? Sure, let's get into the history.
It All Starts with Haml
So, before Sass (not SASS), there was Haml. Haml was created way back in the summer of 2006 by Hampton Lintorn-Catlin[1], when Ruby on Rails had lit the web development world on fire and everyone was rushing to invent cool new ways of writing server-side-rendered web applications with light AJAX support. Rails used YAML for its configuration and Hampton liked the terseness and indentation, so (as he once described to me) he took a template written in ERB (the dominant templating language at the time) and just deleted redundant characters until he got something that felt more DRY. After some tweaks, the result looked essentially like modern Haml:
%section.container
%h1= post.title
%h2= post.subtitle
.content
= post.contentThat fall, just as Haml was released to the public, I was in college taking a Software Design and Development course[2] in which the instructor encouraged us to get involved with open source projects. Rails being the big thing at the time, I hung out on the mailing list[3] looking for good opportunities to dip my toes in. When Haml got announced, it was a perfect opportunity: it was still small and easy to understand, and it had a number of clear tasks that needed doing. I started sending patches, and pretty quickly (at least in part by virtue of having a lot more free time between classes than Hampton did with a full-time job), I became the de facto lead developer.
Sass Emerges
Haml quickly becomes quite popular in the Rails world. Writing HTML closing tags by hand kinda sucks, it turns out, and we're not the last to try to solve this in various ways (although we may have been the first). Hampton is a big ideas guy, and he's always excited to find another big thing to dig into. By this point we're working together pretty closely, so at some point in late 2006 he messages me about his idea for "Haml for CSS", which he wants to call "Sass".
That was the original pitch Hampton sold to me: just like Haml was basically just a different syntax for HTML (or more accurately, for ERB, since it did include the ability to inject Ruby code), Sass was going to be just a different syntax for CSS. The first…