First off - best of luck to y'all. The HW EDA space is sorely in need of tooling improvements. I'm curious as to how your product differs from JITX. They claim the same sort of thing - code based PCB development. And they've been around for a few years now.
The open source aspect was really important to us. We are hoping that ato modules can become a convenient language for the community to share modules with each other, in a similar fashion to python and pypi.
Having an open code base also makes it more convenient for our users to chain tools together. This is currently hard to achieve with the existing close source standards we are dealing with in hardware.
ato is also a markup language (like markdown or latex) more than an actual programming language. We think this makes it more readable and helps guide the user writing code that compiles.
