Comment by pbronez
8 days ago
I think it’s the super low barrier to entry. When I first started 3D printing, I wanted to make basic shapes with decent dimensional accuracy. OpenSCAD lets you install a single app and start doing that immediately. It was easier for me to quickly learn the OpenSCAD syntax than it was to spin up on FreeCAD or Onshape.
I started with Tinkercad, which is online and WYSIWYG. Nice for newcomers, but as a programmer I felt that I needed something that could be more automated.
If I was dealing with diagonals, I needed to calculate sines and cosines outside and then place the values. If needed several objects with the same shape I needed copy and paste them, and if the base shape was wrong, I needed to delete them all, fix, and then copy and paste again. And if a value of dimension, position or angle depended on another it was more and more calculations. Soon it became unsustainable for me.
OpenSCAD saved me. Being able to create modules, using parametric values, declaring functions and so on made my life really easier. At the first it looked like it would be boring to do everything by code, but once you get used to it is actually faster than using a WYSIWYG tool.