alt Hacker NewsFor me as a casual 3d-modeler, my favorite thing about OpenSCAD is that I don't have to learn a new application the size of Photoshop with everything hidden 7 levels deep in some menu that is probably intuitive for some people who learned CAD in the 80s.
Instead it's basically like graphics programming, with a couple of basic primitives, some linear transformations and a bit of set theory. When I do a model a month and get back to previous work, I read a few lines of code and know exactly how I achieved the result.
I was once a big OpenSCAD user myself but I'm really skeptical that there are many use cases where it's actually more intuitive than a traditional CAD program, even if you're a programmer. It's true CAD programs have a huge amount of features but the basic sketch, extrude, revolve, and loft tools aren't conceptually difficult and are basically the same between Onshape, Fusion, Solidworks, etc. Those tools are sufficient to make 99.99% of OpenSCAD models I'm seeing.
I also have the opposite experience about understanding previous scripts. Unless it's dead simple I'm usually thinking why the hell did I multiply this thingy by sqrt(3)/2 plus this other thing. Maybe a documentation problem, but it's inescapable that sometimes you need a lot of math for what are trivial constraints in an interactive sketch. A real CAD program will let you roll back to any feature to figure out how it's constructed step by step so there's really nothing to decipher.