1. It was the Java people who pooh-poohed Rails. The rest of us just got to work cloning it, sans any issues we had with it, in our favorite languages. I haven'

1. It was the Java people who pooh-poohed Rails. The rest of us just got to work cloning it, sans any issues we had with it, in our favorite languages. I haven't seriously programmed in Java for almost ten years. 2. Syntactic sugar isn't just hand-waving; it has a reasonably-concrete definition. And it's generally considered acceptable if it delivers enough convenience (The concept of enough, you will find, is highly subjective.) 3. No one in this exchange has busted on the utility of SASS, so I don't understand why you'd deny anyone a SASS-like tool in a cage match nerd bake-off. For that matter, no one has busted on the practical utility of HAML in this exchange, just on the absence of new concepts i.e. powers of abstraction.