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Comment by asveikau | Hacker News Reader

Openscad feels very comfortable for programmers. Some years ago I tried to use freecad first, and I felt the GUI was getting in the way. (I heard it's gotten better more recently) Declaring geometry in a programming language with variables, functions (err "modules"), for loops etc. is much more intuitive to me.

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Openscad is great for flexible parameterized models as well. However, fillets and chamfers that are just a couple clicks in Fusion 360 are a major undertaking in openscad once your shape is more complicated than a cube. That alone basically kills openscad for me for most use cases

Freecad used to be way outclassed by Fusion, but seems to have made major strides in recent months to bring it closer to the state of the art (even if it's still not quite there)

I thought so too but then I discovered the BOSL2 library and all kinds of others ... makes cubes with round edges so much easier :)

https://github.com/BelfrySCAD/BOSL2/wiki/Tutorial-Rounding_t...

I found it's not so bad to do fillets and chamfers as a for loop that gradually increases or decreases a dimension, then put it as a module to make it into a reusable high level primitive.

As a programmer, I wasn't confortable with OpenSCAD, and ended up moving to Fusion360 like almost everyone else.

The problem isn't the scripting, I am a programmer, I am fine with it. The problem is that I had to do all the math myself, or worse, use hardcoded values when it should have been computed. That is, for example, if I want a hole in the middle of a square face, I want to be able to say "I want a hole in the middle", whatever the language is, without having to solve a math problem.

That's why I prefer constraint-based modeling, like what the likes of Fusion360 offer. Paradoxically, even if it is graphical, it feels more like programming to me than OpenSCAD. In Fusion360, the model is defined as a sequence of instructions (the timeline at the bottom), these are not lines of code, but it is a program. That sequence of instructions can be manipulated, and you can use variables. And it is easier to define things programmatically than with OpenSCAD, where you often have to put in values by hand, because the math is too complicated without an constraint engine like Fusion360 has.

many other code-cad tools exist now too, my personal favorite is buld123d - python (and cadquery)

It might be that I haven't put enough time in, but, I haven't found it as ergonomic as SolidPython (OpenSCAD wrapper).

Have you found that it becomes more natural?

yes, but I may have not used openscad enough.. (I use mostly build123d and some freecad, barely used openscad)

FreeCAD and Fusion360 both have scriptable APIs. CAD models are just documents.

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