[nzoschke]

The former. The first guy that loves Haml a lot has used it on tons of projects, and knows its quirks, has his own clever tricks, etc.

Someone else comes along and has to set up a Ruby environment and learn a new syntax (for layout and templating) just to add a new element to the page. That gets frustrating really quickly.

Haml and its like are not a nightmare at all. I do appreciate the elegance of the resulting code and this offers a lot of benefits. It's just hard to get everyone to buy into it on a team.

[danenania]

I don't really get this. Conceptually, haml IS html. Sure the syntax is a bit different, but it's hard for me to imagine that a decent programmer would get hung up on this. Same with coffeescript really. If a cleaner syntax on top of a language scares you, you don't really grok the original language all that well in my opinion. There are certainly arguments for sticking with vanilla html/js, like the potential minor hassles of dealing with file conversions and debugging generated code, etc., but fear of a new syntax that can be learned in 15 minutes is a weak one.

Edit: I do grant that js to coffeescript is a bit more of a leap than html to haml since coffeescript actually introduces some new language concepts.