Thanks for sharing this blog post! Super cool to see how things were done early in the industry!
Counterintuitively, I do agree with your points. We didn't end up designing the ato language because we actively wanted to end up there but rather because we tried everything else before and none of the solutions we tried worked out.
The problem we wanted to solve was: "how does git look like in hardware?". Another way to phrase it is: "How can groups of people coordinate and share their work in hardware?".
The first solution was simply to put KiCAD on GitLab. That solves the version control part of the problem but doesn't solve consistency of design outputs, coordination and reuse problems. The we tried to add automation on top (namely with KiBOT) to generate manufacturing outputs automatically. That was pretty cool for consistency of manufacturing outputs but it didn't solve the coordination and sharing aspect of the problem. And so at that point we kind of had ran out of ideas of things to try. And that's when we started developing the ato language.
Schematics are definitely a great medium to share a design with your peers. But we've found that for those other aspects I mentioned, code is more suited.
Counterintuitively, I do agree with your points. We didn't end up designing the ato language because we actively wanted to end up there but rather because we tried everything else before and none of the solutions we tried worked out.
The problem we wanted to solve was: "how does git look like in hardware?". Another way to phrase it is: "How can groups of people coordinate and share their work in hardware?".
The first solution was simply to put KiCAD on GitLab. That solves the version control part of the problem but doesn't solve consistency of design outputs, coordination and reuse problems. The we tried to add automation on top (namely with KiBOT) to generate manufacturing outputs automatically. That was pretty cool for consistency of manufacturing outputs but it didn't solve the coordination and sharing aspect of the problem. And so at that point we kind of had ran out of ideas of things to try. And that's when we started developing the ato language.
Schematics are definitely a great medium to share a design with your peers. But we've found that for those other aspects I mentioned, code is more suited.