Which languages should we support? about roots HOT 4 CLOSED

Scss and compass

from roots.

I'm not totally sure on this one. I definitely wanted to ship this with my version of compass (roots), which in my experience has been a lot cleaner and easier to deal with and also includes highly customizable and modular UI mixins. The only thing it doesn't have is the spriting functionality, which I don't use anyway but would be easy to build in if needed (or build as an extension to the command line too - roots sprite folder-name).

Also a big thing for me is to not have this depend on ruby. It's notoriously difficult to install ruby for those who don't have it already, and I'd want to be able to use this for getting people hooked on and/or teaching preprocessors. Installing node is super straightforward and I've never had anyone have trouble with it.

I spent a while looking for a decent port of sass to javascript earlier this week and couldn't really find one that worked. I'm starting to think that just including stylus would be enough - it works with or without brackets and semis so both preferences there are satisfied, and it's definitely cleaner than both sass and scss, and is made for javascript and node.

At the same time, I wouldn't want to isolate people who were super hooked on sass and compass, but I think maybe a sass and compass module should be built as a plugin that can be included with this guy if you want - this way we'd avoid the ruby install problems unless the person almost definitely already had ruby.

from roots.

I've been mulling this over and am thinking we should only ship it with the core set we have defined now: jade, stylus, coffee, ejs, and any type of static file - just to keep it light. I want to define a nice interface for adapters though so that people can easily write extra compilers and pull them into the app when needed.

The nice thing is that it's not too difficult to execute anything from the command line directly, so even if there isn't a good native compiler for say, haml or sass (which honestly there isn't - the ones TJ made are long abandoned and now broken), it should be fairly trivial to implement the compilation of this type of thing directly from the command line.

I think haml and sass (compass if you want but I don't really mess with that stuff) should definitely ship as plugins, and would be a good way to serve as an example plugin template for other people to check out. I'm writing up the plugin spec now, it should be super easy to add in to the existing workflow.

from roots.

I think this has been more or less resolved - the default stack is set as the quickest, cleanest, and most reliable ones we have in javascript - jade, stylus, and coffee. Any extra languages can be easily added to the compile stack through plugins.

from roots.