What ever happened to CSS variables?

There was discussion about this in 2008 and Webkit included variables for a time and then took them out… what happened to them? Have they been killed off?

Only programmers really wanted them, so someone went and created SASS. Then someone improved it with [url=http://lesscss.org/]LESS.

Or maybe it’s specifically Ruby people who hate writing regular CSS?

Maybe variables went the way of parent selectors.