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DesignScript

It’s been a really long time that I wrote about something. For past many years, I have been busy working on a domain specific language called DesignScript and it's visual programming interface Dynamo. I am now moving to a world of reality-capture and I’ll miss working on this technology. I find this technology very useful and every now and then I’ll keep coming to it for some geometric and programming experiment. Recently I am learning machine learning and wondering if I can use Dynamo to explain some of the concepts of machine learning. I’ll explore it further but in the mean time let me explain what is DesignScript and Dynamo.

DesignScript is a scripting language intended to provide programming capability to designers. Designers can now describe their design-intent effectively using this language. Unlike other procedural languages, it provides two great features such as associativity and replication. The associativity in expressions helps it preserve the intent whereas the replication makes it agnostic to the dimensionality of the data. One can establish relationships easily by defining expressions where left-hand side depends on the parameters used in the right-hand side of the expression. e.g.

a = 5;
b = 2 * a; //‘b’ is twice the value of ‘a’, thus ‘b’ depends on ‘a';

The relationship defined by such expressions are associative in nature, i.e. whenever the dependent parameter(s)/variable(s) is(are) modified the left-hand side variable is automatically updated. And the evaluation of this expression is agnostic to the dimensionality of the parameters used in the expression. The parameter ‘a’ in above expression is a singleton value, but later in the program, if we change the value of a to a collection then the expression gets re-evaluated and ‘b’ is updated to a collection, which means we don’t need to run a for-loop to evaluate the expression.

a= 1..5; //‘a’ is a collection of integers from 1 to 5 and now b = {2, 4, 6, 8, 10} due to associativity of ‘b = 2 * a;’ expression.

There are few other features such as zero touch library import allows users to import any .NET library into DesignScript without modifying the library and the public class and methods defined in the library can be called seamlessly from DesignScript.

Dynamo provides a visual programming interface to DesignScript users. They can define their programming logic as a data flow program. Dynamo also support python scripts and users can creates a reusable script using custom nodes. They can also publish their workflow for others to consume it in their design using package manager. More about DesignScript and Dynamo can be learned from http://dynamoprimer.com/ or http://dynamobim.org

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