When OpenSCAD was first released, I finally had a 3D modeling environment which made sense to me.
When the Shapeoko was first announced on Kickstarter (which made use of the opensource projects Arduino, Grbl, and Makerslide, and was iself initially opensource) I finally had a robotic shop assistant which allowed me to make pretty much anything I wanted w/o the need to make myriad fixtures and jigs or to limit myself to traditional joinery techniques.
When Python was added to OpenSCAD as: https://pythonscad.org/ I finally had a programming environment which allowed not just 3D modeling but also mutable variables _and_ the ability to write out files so as to make DXFs or G-code.
So, I am working on:
https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview
and have been using it for my personal projects for a while now --- hopefully I will have a suitably intricate project ready to function as a showcase for its capabilities in a month or so.