In the research I did for my recent post on CSS preprocessors, I came upon a comment that went something like this:

Not using LESS/SASS is like refusing to use a Javascript library.  All CSS preprocessors do is handle the common repetitive tasks in CSS so you don’t have to.

I can’t find where I originally read it, unfortunately, but the sentiment popped up a number of times and has been eating at me ever since I read it.

Javascript libraries are Javascript.  One need not learn a new syntax or resort to command line at any point to get jQuery to work in a project; just include the file in a script reference in your HTML.

A better analogy would be that Javascript is to Javascript libraries as CSS is to toolkits like Twitter Bootstrap, html5boilerplate, et al. (many of which I have had the pleasure of using recently).  These packages leverage plain old CSS to take care of common and repetitive tasks like rounded corners, gradients, and sprites.

The appropriate Javascript analog to CSS preprocessors is CoffeeScript, a new/separate syntax that outputs to Javascript.