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My goal was to produce the design, not to master design tool. The less time I spent the better is my ROI. I have neither time nor desire to dedicate myself to b
by FpUser 4y ago
My goal was to produce the design, not to master design tool. The less time I spent the better is my ROI. I have neither time nor desire to dedicate myself to be a master of particular tool.
- lelanthran 4y ago>>> While I mostly do software at some point I needed to design some piece of equipment from scratch. At the time I happened to have access to Solidworks and without any prior experience in mechanical CAD I was able to do it in about a month. Parts, assembly, subassemblies, regular CNC parts, sheet metal, welds, fastening. Stellar. Despite absolutely insane power the tool is super easy to use for complete noob. I tried later on to do something like this in FreeCad - never fucking again. >> Yes, SolidWorks is easy to pick up and use with no training. FreeCAD is not; it requires dedicated time to learn, following tutorials, and at least a few throw-away projects to gain proficiency. There are a lot of easy mistakes that can sabotage progress, and multiple ways of doing things that are different under the hood, where those differences aren't obvious, including some ways that are bad and wrong. But there's a lot it can do, and it gets better all the time. > My goal was to produce the design, not to master design tool. The less time I spent the better is my ROI. I have neither time nor desire to dedicate myself to be a master of particular tool. This is actually how a lot of the "Niche language $FOO is a superior language" arguments go.
- regularfry 4y agoIt's also a counterpoint to "but it's doing a complicated job so the UI has to be complicated" nonsense defence that gets brought up in FreeCAD's defence a lot.
- lelanthran 4y ago> It's also a counterpoint to "but it's doing a complicated job so the UI has to be complicated" nonsense defence that gets brought up in FreeCAD's defence a lot. That defence is used for $SUPERIOR_LANGUAGE too. Look at the large numbers of devs who feel that the extra cognitive load needed to learn (for example) monads is worth it. Or the large number of posts explaining Rusts syntactical mess as "It's doing a complicated job so the interface has to be complicated." Hell, nevermind languages, that argument gets thrown across the entire tech stack - the submission yesterday about complexity had a number of posters who felt that there's no additional complexity in using Kubernetes even for an application that never needs to scale horizontally! Is it any surprise then that we see the same argument for different tech, even though it's a clearly invalid argument 99% of the time.
- regularfry 4y agoNo, it's not surprising. It's a failure of abstraction design. But that's ok, designing a good abstraction that correctly hides things that can be hidden, in a composable, comprehensible way, is a really, really hard job. It's ok to fail at that. What's not ok is denying that failure and gaslighting users into self-blame while preventing trying something better.
- lelanthran 4y ago> What's not ok is denying that failure and gaslighting users into self-blame while preventing trying something better. Forgive me, I wasn't attempting to imply that the practice is okay. I was just pointing out that the practice is normal, across the entire tech stack. It is common for people to reject high-cognitive load stuff, and at this point it is common to have others jump in with "they're dinosaurs resistant to change", "Every $TECH has a learning curve" or similar stuff.
- regularfry 4y agoNo worries, we're vigorously agreeing :-)
- helmholtz 4y agoPeople talk shit about CATIA all the time, and I never understand why. There are not many things that can do what CATIA does. Big assemblies, things with a huge number of moving parts, are all CATIA when they're not NX, because you actually can open them and move them around in it. Formula 1? CATIA. Large Hadron Collider? CATIA. Airbus? Guess what? CATIA is rubbish. But everything else is way worse.
- FpUser 4y agoI was not talking about CATIA as I have never used it, I did not even know it exists. All my musings were about SW vs FreeCAD. I did not need to assemble the airplane / LHC so this particular benefit you are describing is / was completely irrelevant to me.
- helmholtz 4y agoWhoops. My apologies. Thought when you said "No catia", you meant "Never again" or something along those lines. Didn't realise you'd never used it.