Why did less, sass, ruby ​​on rails, bower, grunt become popular? And why are they needed?

Question

Ruby on Rails

Ladies and gentlemen, many years ago I was the most ordinary php programmer, there were many of us, and no one had heard of other languages ​​for the web. A couple of years passed, I started typing web2.0, where it was not necessary to completely reload the page, but to load the missing one using, for example, jquery. So I mastered the very basics of this framework and began to delve deeper into css / html. Now I am a jack of all trades: I code well in php, I make a good front-end in js + css + html. It would seem that everything is fine. In my work I rely on PSPad - a notepad with syntax highlighting (I tried to switch to true notepad ++, but PSPad has already become much more familiar). Of the frameworks, both for the back-end and for the front, I use only my own developments, well, it just got easier. Sometimes, of course, I use someone else's. Let's say a slider :) Why am I all this. My skills and my knowledge allow me to make beautiful and functional projects. I'm not complaining, customers are happy.
The crux of the matter is what, I blew the moment when such things as less, sass, ruby ​​on rails so suddenly became popular ... why?
I don’t understand at all, it’s not bad at all without any additional things? or not?

Answer 1

Why did they become? From laziness and unwillingness to think with your brain.
They become popular thanks to the promotion by Google, Yandex and others like them of all sorts of "coding standards". Despite the fact that both Yandex and Google are very far from ideal in this regard.
These frameworks are good for the end-to-end development of large projects, when all participants are familiar with these methods, have been collaborating for a long time, etc. Those. for the big companies. Despite the fact that most large companies still have their own standards.
Well, the rest already, like monkeys, picked it up. And they require BEM, SASS, Angular for a static single page. You start to find out why the customer needs all this - "and our designer advised me like that" ... Or when you undertake to finish someone else's project with a bunch of unfinished tails in SASS - it's still a pleasure and "optimization of writing code" - stupidly manually text search has to go through the files look for lost variables.
The setup itself, the development of common standards and syntax for these frameworks, takes a lot of time.
So basically you haven't missed anything. Browsers still do not understand SASS and others like it))
Write as you like. If the client insists, try to find out the reasons for such persistence. If the case is clinical - send the forest!

Answer 2

You just got lost in the middle of the 2000s, and for some things even at the beginning.
It's worth a bit of catching up.
Of course, you can also write in a notepad. I started using eclipse, nusphere (phped) in the middle of the 2000s, but now I can’t imagine life without PHPStorm. For simple code, I usually use sublime.
And of course, I also can’t imagine life without preprocessors, modern developments, etc. Anything that seems crazy to you. For example, instead of PHP on the server side, use NodeJS or Go in general.
Remember cell phones were rare in the 90s? They were new.
But now, life without them (I'm talking about regular cell phones, without chats) I just can't imagine.
Everything is like with any other direction, technologies are developing, a person gets used to conveniences and does not want to go back. Accordingly, companies are looking for employees who would have a set of modern knowledge, because. For team work, this is very helpful.

Answer 3

Horrible. What's in the question, what's in the answers. On the one hand, there is no need to delete such questions. On the other hand, there is no mechanism here to make it clear where the delirium begins.
I wanted to write a lot, I quote both the question and the answers, but I changed my mind.
Short:
Think about it, do you make projects or business card sites, corporate sites, online stores from $100 in five working days ?
You need to get acquainted first with:
www.phptherightway.com
https://github.com/dypsilon/frontend-dev-bookmarks
Ruby, php, python or nodge in the vast majority - it doesn't matter. But here I was answering a similar question about Ruby and tried to answer objectively the question about the differences with PHP: PHP+Symfony or Ruby+RoR?
To put it even more briefly: since you are now asking such questions, it means that you have not had to deal with tasks where there is nothing without it. In the meantime, you will not encounter yourself, no one will "convince" you that this is all necessary

Answer 4

I'm afraid to make a mistake, but this arises from the impossibility or unwillingness to develop one's horizons, make it a rule on Sunday evening for a couple of hours to look at least at the Web Development hub, where people already aggregate all the data into articles for you, many topics intersect, even especially without delving into the essence of each tool in a month or two, you will be perfectly oriented both in them and in solutions based on them. Without this, you will not understand what you need and what not. Don't believe people who say that CSS preprocessors, for example, are useless things, rubbish for lazy people. Either they don't know what it is, or they are masochists. No one has ever complained from those who have tried it. Still... anyone who is interested will be disgusted by the fact that the mixin writes vendor prefixes for you, variables store the entire set of colors for your project or other delights.

Answer 5

At one time (PHP4), my friend and I argued for a long time what OOP is for. We came to the conclusion that only to facilitate teamwork. Since then, the language has evolved, now OOP provides a bunch of other benefits.
Now the situation is the same with all these pre- and post-processors, managers, etc. It's handy for big projects with a lot of people working on it, but for small sites it just slows down development.
Conclusion: if you want to work in a large company - study it, if you want to be a freelancer - select what will be convenient for you to use, and the rest - in the furnace.

Answer 6

Demand creates supply. The most common thing.
The volume and complexity of tasks is growing, old ones are being improved and new tools are being created to solve them.

Answer 7

Don't worry, these things just simplify and automate the routine for those who have a brain. Without them, it’s quite possible to work slowly and do EVERYTHING.
But if, on the contrary, as in my case, I know all these things, but I can’t program one fig. Here is already a problem. And less with grunt won't write anything for me.

Answer 8

Check out Travis Nelson's video here . He talks about his vision of CSS frameworks. Is this good or bad? What benefits can be obtained from their use? Is there a right time to start learning frameworks? And are they needed at all?