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Comment by okso | Hacker News Reader

Declarative CAD systems like OpenSCAD are very attractive to people with a programmer mindset (in opposition to people trained on existing cads), but the space seems under developed.

I dream of using something similar with better tools and language, and a feeling similar to writing HTML and CSS.

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OpenSCAD required bottom-up approach, starting from smallest features to be able to transform their position in a final model. Too hard for actual real things to make reason about. I'm a programmer for 20 years and can't use OpenSCAD.

CadQuery is more abstract and manageable, allows to base your workflow on workplanes and start from big features, top-bottom. It's a nice approach for small models but assemblies are a real pain.

OpenSCAD is extremely tedious to use, although I very much like the idea. The main Problem to me seems that it has zero facilities for helping you do parametric modelling. Usually, if you want to have a certain 2D shape in a parametric modeller you can specify a few basic parameters and let the software derive the rest, in OpenSCAD the duty is on you to derive a geometric equation which gives all points for the shape given the parametrs. It very quickly becomes non-stop highschool geometry for everything you want to do.

I think you could have a language where you programatically specify a shape, which is then compiled into e.g. an array of points and can then be used in the programm.

Every time I sit down to do anything non-trivial in OpenSCAD, I wonder if there isn't some better way of representing things --- I'd like for there to to be something better, but usually the solution to any problem put forth on the OpenSCAD mailing list is: "learn this bit of math and apply it thusly".

That said, I gave up on all this and have switched over to just modeling toolpaths:

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview

that way, I'm certain that whatever is modeled can actually be made, and I'm also certain that the modeling is not limited by arbitrary things. I've got an idea for a woodworking joint which I haven't been able to model so as to cut out in any other program, and I'm hoping this will let me finally manage it.

I've been using OpenSCAD Graph Editor (OSGE) as a front-end:

https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor

which has been working well, though I'm trying not to be distracted by:

https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9

having recently been announced.

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