Area programmer laments designers don’t use the same tools he does • Hacker News Board

Re: Area programmer laments designers don’t use the same tools he does

#61

Post by rjsw » Mon, Sep 29, 2014, 11:46 AM UTC

kanzure wrote: post #56

rjsw wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of money and effort was going into STEP [1] in the same timeframe, it is still in use for designing anything that flies. I'm the editor of one of the parts of it and we are seeing increasing interest from other industry sectors. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_10303

> I'm the editor of one of the parts of it Any thoughts about or contributions to http://stepcode.org/ by any chance?

I have helped a little bit with checking their compliance to the standards.

I modified the compiler that is in stepcode many years ago to generate ASN.1 definitions for the STEP models, the idea was to define some RPC operations to allow the kind of thing that ChuckMcM describes but I couldn't find anybody interested in it at the time. It would have been easy enough to write another compiler back end to generate XDR.

I guess I would prefer to be paid to work on STEP, there is a fair bit of politics involved in it and I'm already involved with several opensource projects that are more fun.

Also, if I'm looking for an opensource project to contribute to then I wouldn't pick one that used C++ and git, sorry.

I have got some diffs to Express Engine [1] that I need to send in though.

[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/exp-engine/

Re: Area programmer laments designers don’t use the same tools he does

#62

Post by ef4 » Mon, Sep 29, 2014, 2:53 PM UTC

hueving wrote: post #60

ef4 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are workflows which gasp do not mesh well with github. If we're discussing open source collaboration, it is hugely beneficial to NOT have your own unique workflow and instead adopt one that a large community of people are already using. In the time it takes to read your special "how to submit a patch" document, I could have already been done if you were using a de-facto standard workflow like Github's. This h…

>I have heard it argued that making contributions harder to submit is somehow a good idea, because it keeps lower quality contributors out. This is very much mistaken, and even someone as cantankerous as Linus is on the record saying that encouraging more patches, even annoyingly naive ones, is in the long-term interest of the project. Yet Linux is not being developed on Github. Clearly the missing data in the github…

> Clearly the missing data in the github workflow is so detrimental that it's not worth the extra developers it might attract.

There is historical path dependence. Linux has changed workflows before, but each time it was controversial. I can see where it wouldn't be worth igniting a holy war.

The more interesting question is what new projects should do. Even Linus puts new things (https://github.com/torvalds/subsurface) on Github.

Re: Area programmer laments designers don’t use the same tools he does

#63

Post by jbargmann » Tue, Sep 30, 2014, 2:23 AM UTC

marcosscriven wrote: post #27

huuu wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think STL is a nice file format that is used a lot. It can be imported and exported in a lot of 3d software.

STL is really bad for 3D printing IMO. It's just a bag of triangles - there's absolutely nothing tying those faces together, and it's thus a constant battle with floating point precision to make sure there's no 'holes' in models, so they can be effectively sliced.

Alternative? Do tell.