When comparing Sly vs Garden (Clojure), the Slant community recommends Sly for most people. In the question“What are the best CSS preprocessors/postprocessors?” Sly is ranked 8th while Garden (Clojure) is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Sly is:
By using whitespaces and nesting, you don't need braces or semicolons. This helps with keeping the syntax as readable and minimal as possible.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Readable syntax
By using whitespaces and nesting, you don't need braces or semicolons. This helps with keeping the syntax as readable and minimal as possible.
Pro Supports variables out of the box
Sly has out of the box support for variables.
Pro Style webpages with a full programming language
With Garden, you have access to all the core features of a powerful programming language to build your scripts, including functions, variables, namespaces, and data manipulation like map merging or concatenation.
Pro Full-stack Clojure with ClojureScript for front-end + Clojure for backend
Garden finishes the full Clojure stack experience — you can have the entire codebase in a single language with ClojureScript on the front-end, Clojure on the backend, and Garden for CSS.
Pro Hot loading
Using the core Garden auto loader or the excellent Garden Gnome plugin, watch your style changes take effect in the browser as soon as you save the code — no reload required.
Pro Styles as data-nesting are obvious
Clojure is a data-oriented programming language with strong emphasis on simple, clear inline data structures. Garden models styles using these same structures, making the cascade visually obvious.
Pro Clean syntax
Other options listed include various pain-points like use of @ symbols or too much cruft; because Garden is just Clojure, and Clojure is a very well-designed language aimed to emphasize simplicity and positive developer experience (without semantic whitespace problems), you have the full benefit of a well-designed and general-purpose syntax.
Pro CSS-engine accessible from front-end
Because Garden is also Clojurescript friendly, this means that you can dynamically effect styles based on app state.
Cons
Con Extremely limited adoption
Sly has just 5 stars on Github and a very small adoption rate. For an open source project this usually means less bugs reported, lesser documentation and few third-party learning resources.
Con Not stable
Sly is in the alpha stage.
Con Harder to apply shared styles
Because you are working in Clojure, you can't just paste in raw css style snippets shared elsewhere.
