On 25 Nov 2020 at 12:39, crunchysteve wrote:

I'll add a penny to that 2c. I am apparently unable to wrap my head around
Python. An OpenSCADAlike that requires me to do Python would definitely
be a non-starter for me.

Yes Python is a lot more complicated than OpenSCAD, so I guess it would be
harder to learn for a Newbie. It is hard to judge as I never struggled to
learn a computer language but after ending a career writing C++, I much
prefer Python for programming and OpenScad for describing in my spare time.

On Wed, 25 Nov 2020 at 20:55, lar3ry@sasktel.net wrote:

doug.moen wrote

This.

I looked into this when I was new at OpenSCAD, I even started to build a VBA
layer which would act as a front end to the OpenSCAD code, but in the end,
after quite a lot of work, I dropped it, because I realized that to properly
"drive" OpenSCAD, I would have to re-implement almost all of the 3D logic.
My code needed to know what OpenSCAD was going to do with the stuff I put
into it, and know what the result was going to be, for it to be able to do
the stuff I wanted, and then it would be easier to just rebuild it all, and
I didn't want to do that.

Yes, OpenSCAD can be very frustrating sometimes, and seemingly simple things
can be next to impossible (see my 2D outline thingy in a recent thread...),
but it can almost always get the work done simply and effectively, and if
you take some times building a part library and a library of helper modules,
it's very nice to work with. My OpenSCAD code doesn't look much like
OpenSCAD at all anymore, especially when I do 3D stuff, as I almost
exclusively use my parts and helper modules, and almost never use the base
OpenSCAD functions, not even basic stuff like translate() and rotate().

--
Sent from: http://forum.openscad.org/

The biggest break in moving to python is having to deal with the indent
based blocks. Which I personally have, at work I spend not insignificant
amounts of time fixing broken kubernetes yaml files, so much so that we
have now switched everything to json (k8s does both),  becuase it's easier.

Please if openscad shifts language base, don't use python, it sucks,
JavaScript is much better and the two main implementations squirrelmonkey
and v8 are designed to be embedded in c++ based codebases and allow
extension by adding default objects and functions to the interpreter. Both
also support JIT compilation. JavaScript has a bigger user base, tooling
and is closer to the existing language syntax.

On Thu, Nov 26, 2020, 07:34 nop head nop.head@gmail.com wrote:

Thanks for summing it up so nicely, and I fully agree with that;
though given the tendency to manipulate huge object trees, instead of
Javascript my personal choice would be some list-based language, e.g.
Julia, but that's about tastes and colors. For a very close example,
Lilypond (a music score program, with which I'm reasonably familiar)
uses Scheme as a scripting language, and it works quite well once you
are used to it.

The “ “ “ best ” ” ” (triples quotes intentional) way to move away
from OpenSCAD to another language (by which I mean, if this were
absolutely really really necessary, the reasonable choice) would be by
exposing an API (including at low level OpenCSG, GCAL, and at a higher
level the preview and customizer windows, etc.) around which the user
could program in anywhich language, including standard OpenSCAD.

On the other hand, the current OpenSCAD language, although definitely
not perfect, is quite a good start in its current form (there is some
impressive code out there, such as relativity.scad; and, as a recent
user, I am starting to have quite some fun with the language...). I
think that instead of moving languages, efforts would be best employed
to

1. iron out the most irritating bits of the language, which seems to
   be already partly in the works (two “easy” examples, that I would
   find extremely useful: passing functions around, and enabling
   variadic functions/list unwrapping, possibly via an ellipsis
   operator (which would also supersede the ugly “each”); there are
   certainly other examples that I did not think of);

2. try to work out a “standard library” of basic functions and modules
   (for another comparable, successful example, think of what LaTeX is
   to TeX). E.g. most of us will have implemented at least a few basic
   list operations (flatten(), sum() etc); linear algebra; conversion
   between Euler angles and rotation matrices; etc. Since these are
   perfectly possible in userland they should be distributed in
   userland.

Point 2 might in turn require marginal tweaks to the basic language. A
concrete example is renaming modules; my own “standard library”, as a
lot of others likely do, defines an enhanced version of
linear_extrude, which is backwards-compatible, but yet I had to call
it lin_extrude. Also see how relativity.scad had to rename cube,
cylinder and sphere to box, rod and ball.

I don't mean to pick on any particular person, but the responses below
really tell the story.  We are a relatively small community that is
geographically diverse and with diverse computer backgrounds.  I would
add my personal language preference (Pascal or Modula II), but why go
on?  There is no single language that would gain majority support within
our ranks.

It is clear that there are many external efforts to "do OpenSCAD right",
so if others want to add to the list, they should do so. There have been
recent testimonials about how challenging that can be.

The rest of us need to focus on how to improve OpenSCAD.  One way to do
this would be to come together to create a short list of important
changes, and then provide funding or programming effort for those changes.

There may not be very many libraries available for OpenSCAD, but there
are more than enough to make my head spin.  Many of them are very
powerful.  Should we ask OpenSCAD to do everything we want, or OpenSCAD
plus a library to do everything we want?  I believe that the latter is
the important issue.  No other language survives (is popular) without
its libraries.

I find the language comparisons to be entertaining but not productive,
if what we really want is a more powerful and more effective OpenSCAD.

I have recently started using Carsten's AngelCAD, which now can accept
OpenSCAD files.  I can develop with OpenSCAD (for the most part) but
when OpenSCAD falls on its face (either in terms of crashing or taking
too much time to complete a calculation), I can turn to AngelCAD to get
the job done.  Perhaps we can separate the language from the efficiency
of calculating STL files.

Jon

On 11/26/2020 9:14 AM, Jérôme Plût wrote:

There is an openscad plugin for InteliJ (which has a community version)
that does full language parsing, colourisation, intellisense and does file
and block re-formatting,. Which uses openscad to do preview and stl output.
It also has full support for git, which find incredibly confident. I don't
use the openscad app much any more as a result.  The only pain is
remembering to close the preview in the copy of openscad instead of just
switching back to the editor, of you end up spawning lots of copies of scad
without realizing it.

It would be cool if it could track the active pid and repeat updates on
that instance so you can have intellij on one screen and openscad on the
other. But that will probaly come.

https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/11198-openscad-language-support

On Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 14:18 Revar Desmera revarbat@gmail.com wrote:

While I was the one to start that IntelliJ plugin, I didn't touch it
for a long time, development and maintenance was taken over by Lucien
Denisey who does a good job on it. Thanks Lucien :-)

On Linux I have the following python method to achieve detecting an
already running Openscad window with a specific file:

def open_scad_once(scad_file):
"""
Opens the given file in openscad, if not already open.
:param scad_file: the file to be opened in OpenSCAD
"""
processes = [
pid for pid in os.listdir("/proc")
if (
pid.isdigit()
and read_content("/proc/%s/cmdline" %
pid).strip("\0").split("\0") == [
"openscad", scad_file
]
)
]
if len(processes) == 0:
os.system("openscad %s &" % scad_file)

I use this function from PyCharm to open scad files generated by
SolidPython scripts, so far it works well for me.

While it is python and the IntelliJ plugin is Java, I guess it gives a
hint on how it can be done on linux - Mac could be relatively similar,
Windows is a different beast though and I have no idea how it would
work.

Cheers,
Csaba

On Fri, 2020-12-04 at 05:00 +0800, Tim Hawkins wrote:

http://lists.openscad.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.openscad.org

Cool, I'm a Linux man aswell

On Fri, Dec 4, 2020, 08:12 Csaba Nagy ncsaba@javampire.com wrote: