A few reasons why we do not need meta languages…

Just for the trolls: This is no bashing of the articles about less, sass, haml, coffeescript, etc. Especially the one I've read on Mayflower's blog is very true.

But! 

A language that doesn't change the way you think about programming is not worth learning.— Alan Perlis

And I think Alan is right. None of the languages mentioned above changes the way you think about the language it "generates". The only thing you change, is the way you write stuff in shorter, maybe more oop-ish or whatever style. But does it change the way we think about HTML & CSS? As long as people still addicted to table layouts, we might have more important problems than just writing less code, don't we?

I did not met any – pure – HTML/CSS guy/gal yet, who ever said, that haml, sass or less did the right job for him/her. Only the PHP and Ruby guys and gals who are forced to write stylesheets love this style of writing. And by the way: As we generate HTML strings with PHP, why don't we use the same cool technology to generate CSS in a proper way? We (the PHP world) have invented a thousand ways to abstract and instrument the generation of websites (which means HTML – just wanted to mention it 😉 ), that we need another two or three ways to generate some other text (CSS, JavaScript, …)? 

Let me take something from "the zen of python" for a quote:

There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.

For me, the obivous way to do it is "use the weapons at hand", use your well known language (PHP, Ruby, Python … whatever it might be).

Just for my information: Is there anyone out there who does HTML/CSS only (no PHP, no RoR or whatever) and uses haml, sass and/or less?