I find it more intuitive as a paradigm, but I think the real reason for lack of code interfaces in professional packages is probably because CAD models are built incrementally, and a lot of computation that the user doesn't notice gets baked in along the way. The workflows in CadQuery and OpenSCAD involve rerunning the whole script after every modification, effectively rebuilding everything from scratch each time, which quickly stops being fast as the model gets more complex.
I spent quite some time in FreeCAD, then switched to makerjs. For the last two covid years "code cad" designs for laser cutter have consumed most of my free time.
I am also building my own online editor with focus on UX and live reloading [1].
Few key learnings I had about code vs visual (tldr it's complicated):
- It works great for flat laser cut assemblies, but once you start doing t-nut and finger joints you really need to see your pieces rotated and aligned in 3D. and that's a lot of extra code
- Writing a geometry library from scratch is really hard. I tried multiple newer JS libraries (that aren't ports of OpenCASCADE / CGAL) and all of them had numerous bugs in boolean operations, offsets, etc. There's just too many corner cases, compounding errors, APIs that haven't been thought thru and became a tech debt, etc.
- Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places or building a wrong thing, but there aren't that many users interested in "writing code for a 3d printer". Very few people dropping complex code cad projects on github. It feels like everyone who does is also building their own CAD platform ;)
I find it more intuitive as a paradigm, but I think the real reason for lack of code interfaces in professional packages is probably because CAD models are built incrementally, and a lot of computation that the user doesn't notice gets baked in along the way. The workflows in CadQuery and OpenSCAD involve rerunning the whole script after every modification, effectively rebuilding everything from scratch each time, which quickly stops being fast as the model gets more complex.