The same could probably be said of most of the HTML generators out there. HAML, in particular, has a lot of similarities. I agree that programmatic things shou

The same could probably be said of most of the HTML generators out there. HAML, in particular, has a lot of similarities. I agree that programmatic things should be done with programming. I also think that for those who are coming from CSS, the barriers are lower with something that has the shape of CSS. And, the other part of this argument for pre-processors is that they "work." If I were to approach most junior front-end devs with a given programming language versus SASS to generate their CSS, most of them would pick SASS simply because of syntactic familiarity. Not a particularly compelling reason methodologically speaking, but the natural shift does make it a reasonably easy transition from purely declarative to pseudo-dynamic. The purist in me agrees, but the practical implementation says these things are valuable.