SteamCAD – 2D CAD designed to draw steam locomotives • Hacker News Board

Re: SteamCAD – 2D CAD designed to draw steam locomotives

#31

Post by thaeli » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 8:08 AM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #26

nogabebop23 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the ideal, but unfortunately this is only a characteristic of software that is not (widely) used. In a combination of the Peter Principle and the Big Bang, software will be used in an every-expanding array of uses for which it will attempt to add first-party support until it collapses under it's own mass and dies a death of ten thousand vertical slice competitors and the process repeats.

Knuth's TeX is somewhat widely used, yet has the similar characteristic of approaching stability.

Only because LaTeX is separate and most of the development and new features happen there.

Re: SteamCAD – 2D CAD designed to draw steam locomotives

#32

Post by Rexxar » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 8:55 AM UTC

Shorel wrote: post #20

Rexxar wrote: post #5

Looks interesting but the sample svg image make my Firefox suffers to render it.

I did not even notice the time it spent rendering the image. And my laptop is far from powerful, it is an old Ryzen 5 2500u from two years ago.

It's quite strange, the problem is more visible when I click directly on the image (https://github.com/oskardolch/SteamCAD/blob/master/Images/26...). Then my browser freeze 2/3 seconds after the image is rendered. So it's probably not the image itself that cause the problem but the GitHub file visualizer.

Re: SteamCAD – 2D CAD designed to draw steam locomotives

#33

Post by tobr » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 9:50 AM UTC

avhon1 wrote: post #21

mmastrac wrote: post #8

I love how specific yet comprehensive this package is. The manual appears to be lovingly crafted and from what I can tell, well written [1]. I don't know how many people are specifically looking to draw CAD diagrams of steam locomotives, but I absolutely love that this was someone's itch to scratch and they put so much time into this. [1] https://github.com/oskardolch/SteamCAD/blob/master/SteamCAD....

One related thing that struck me about SteamCAD was this passage from (the last page of) the manual: "5.1 What Next? Some people may be interested in what are the future plans with SteamCAD. The answer is there are none. SteamCAD is finished software (the only one in the whole computer world?), there are no plans to extend it. It does everything it was supposed to do, if there are bugs in the software, they are now f…

While it’s not very common for “utility” software, it’s still the MO for most games. They might get bug fixes or be ported to new platforms, but usually what goes out on release day is intended as “finished”.