You’re right, HAML Is Not About Designers Complaining

Kyle Neath has a post claiming that HAML is completely unnecessary.

My main beef with HAML is that it’s completely unnecessary. In order to write HAML, you have to have written HTML (either in your head or in code). Then you write HAML. Which outputs HTML. This is absurd.

Actually, what’s absurd is claiming that you have to write it first in HTML, even in your head. Once you use it, and not even for that long, it exceedingly easy to drop all the brackets and attributes, and just write the HAML. I don’t find myself thinking, “Now, I want a div here, so in HAML that would be, %div… Oh, wait, I don’t need the actual div if I have a class or id…” It’s really not that hard.

To me, HAML and Ruby/Rails is like chocolate and peanut butter: they go great together. In fact, it’s like really good dark chocolate, and all natural organic peanut butter. That’s how good it is. Now, there are people who don’t like chocolate and peanut butter together. That’s fine. But to say chocolate and peanut butter are “unnecessary”, well, that’s just asking for it.