Less or Sass

Hi, I have been using less for a long time with my concrete themes and have been reading a bit about less vs sass, it doesn’t seem like one is all that much better than the other, it just depends who you ask. So I was wondering what people think about this, if you know less well does it make sense to just stick with it, or is there some big advantage to switching to sass now that concrete supports it? I’m thinking about taking the lazy way out and continuing with less rather than learning all about sass.

Thanks -Peter

Just created a new theme and I still use less. It works with both v8.5.6 and v9. Surprised to see I could customise?

From a features and adoption perspective, Sass tends to be seen as a better choice.

But the main reason I believe Less has been used in theme customisation is that Sass is more difficult to reliably compile through PHP, whereas Less works fine. I haven’t read anything myself about V9 supporting Sass compiling, I’d be wondering if that’s via PHP, or whether you have to do that with your own tools.

So I think it comes down to context - if you’re wanting to compile on server using PHP, you might find that Less is faster and more reliable. If you’re wanting to use a compiler for building themes, and it’s something you’d just compile locally, you might find that Sass has more features.

But ultimately I think it’s just a case of selecting what you’re happy to use and fast in - if Less serves all your purposes right now there’s probably no reason to switch to sass.

That being said, Sass isn’t really that tricky, you can do a lot with just a few bits of syntax, and you don’t have to learn it all in depth - if you already understand how Less works, you’d probably find you’d only need a few hours to swap. We use a few loops in our projects, but we’re really just using the nesting and variables - very easy to read.

I was assuming v9 supported sass compiling, getting up to speed with sass doesn’t look like it will be a big deal, but I think for the sites I build less will do me fine. I did read somewhere that less is a bit faster and has better debugging, either is going to get the job done.