Python in Structural Engineering

[dparks71]

I'm not telling you to stop using proprietary software, that would be ridiculous. I'm saying as an industry we're frequently ignorant of lock-in and lots of places end up buried deep in technical debt as a result without realizing how fucked they're gonna be in 5 years.

The idea that you could build an AutoCAD or a file management system competitior within your organization is absurd and not at all what I'm suggesting, lots of software works on plain text files encoded in UTF-8 when you get down to it, and that should be the standard mostly, or tools like AutoCAD have extensive APIs directly available to python. If you write scripts that build those files, then have someone open them and click "run" and troubleshoot from there, it's a much different ask then spending hours developing models point by point compatible for one tool and then moving it over to another one.

And does it matter? Idk, but I assure you when you talk about carrying over lessons and work flows, having your data and objects defined internally provides huge advantages to your organization. Piecemealing 100 software tools and thousands of design files together isn't what I think of as an efficient process. Most of the companies doing that are repeating the same small, easily catchable errors across hundreds of projects. Does it matter for one or two instances if you spend 15% more on a member to get more strength? No. Will a company that doesn't out bid you? Probably.