Hampton Lintorn-Catlin ( né Catlin; born 1982) is an American computer programmer, programming language inventor, gay rights advocate, and author, best known as the creator of the Sass and

Haml Haml (HTML Abstraction Markup Language) is a templating system that is designed to avoid writing inline code in a web document and make the HTML cleaner. Haml gives the flexibility to have some dynamic content in HTML. Similar to other template s ...

markup languages. Hampton was a Vice President of Engineering at

Rent the Runway Rent the Runway is an e-commerce platform that allows users to rent, subscribe, or buy designer apparel and accessories. It was founded by Jennifer Hyman and Jennifer Fleiss, who launched the company in November 2009. History In 2007, Hyman ...

, and has previously held similar roles at Moovweb, Wordset, and at the

Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...

. He is currently Chief Technology Officer at Thriveworks.

Creations

Haml

He created a lightweight markup language called

which he intended to be a radically different design for inline page templating systems like

eRuby Embedded Ruby (also shortened as ERB) is a templating system that embeds Ruby into a text document. It is often used to embed Ruby code in an HTML document, similar to ASP and JSP, and PHP and other server-side scripting languages. The tem ...

in Ruby. Since its initial release in 2006, Haml has been in constant development and has been ported to over 10 other languages. It's the second most popular templating language for the

Ruby on Rails Ruby on Rails (simplified as Rails) is a server-side web application framework written in Ruby under the MIT License. Rails is a model–view–controller (MVC) framework, providing default structures for a database, a web service, and we ...

framework and has inspired many other templating languages.

Sass

In 2007, Catlin created a

style sheet language A style sheet language, or style language, is a computer language that expresses the presentation of structured documents. One attractive feature of structured documents is that the content can be reused in many contexts and presented in various ...

to expand on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), used to describe presentation semantics of web pages. Catlin continued to work on Sass with co-designer Natalie Weizenbaum through 2008. Sass is now bundled as part of Rails. In 2011, he co-wrote with his husband the book ''Pragmatic Guide to Sass'', published through The Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Wikipedia Mobile

Catlin wrote several applications for

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also include ...

and other mobile platforms, including ''Dictionary!'', a popular dictionary application, and a

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

browsing client which was later purchased by the

. He was subsequently hired by Wikimedia and given the role as mobile development lead for the Foundation, launching the official mobile website in June 2009. The backend for the site was developed using Ruby and the Merb framework.

Personal life

Catlin was born in 1982 in

Jacksonville, Florida Jacksonville is a city located on the Atlantic coast of northeast Florida, the most populous city proper in the state and is the List of United States cities by area, largest city by area in the contiguous United States as of 2020. It is the co ...

and currently resides in New York with his husband and collaborator, Michael Catlin. The couple made headlines in late March, 2014, for removing a simple puzzle game they had built together from the

Mozilla Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, w ...

Marketplace after

Brendan Eich Brendan Eich (; born July 4, 1961) is an American computer programmer and technology executive. He created the JavaScript programming language and co-founded the Mozilla project, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla Corporation. He served ...

was appointed CEO of Mozilla. They called for a boycott of Mozilla, pledging "We will continue our boycott until Brendan Eich is completely removed from any day to day activities at Mozilla...." Eich had previously been the center of controversy surrounding his support for

Proposition 8 Proposition 8, known informally as Prop 8, was a California ballot proposition and a state constitutional amendment intended to ban same-sex marriage; it passed in the November 2008 California state elections and was later overturned in cou ...

, a ballot initiative that banned marriage equality in California, which was re-ignited by his promotion to CEO. After a large public outcry and several Mozilla Foundation employees publicly calling for him to step down, Eich voluntarily stepped down only a week after taking his new position. When asked if he'd donate again, Eich responded "I don't want to answer hypotheticals." In a follow up blog post, Catlin explained meeting Eich to find middle ground and expressing dismay at the response, calling the outcome a "sad victory".

References

External links

* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Catlin, Hampton American computer programmers American male non-fiction writers American technology writers 1982 births Living people Web developers Free software programmers Wikimedia Foundation staff members LGBT people from Florida People from Jacksonville, Florida American Wikimedians