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I was getting a bit tired spending tons of mouse-clicks making an electronics footprint in a CAD program. Madparts is a tool which is more compatible with my way of working, and it'll save me time.
When you make a new footprint you start from the specification from the vendor. Then you do calculations to adjust them to your needs, tool limits, ... If your footprint is code you can put the calculations right there in the footprint, documenting your approach for yourself and others. If there turns out to be a problem you can look back and see what went wrong, and make (and document!) the needed changes.
Not necessarily. Most of the time you can just clone an existing footprint and adjust the numbers. There are plenty of examples available to start from.
Coffeescript is compact and I think it is still quite easy to understand by most people with just a tiny bit of coding experience.
Indeed madparts is written in python, so python would be rather trivial to add. However python is much more verbose then coffeescript. Maybe the option to use python will appear some time in the future.
As a footprint library is just a directory, and each footprint is just a file, you can very easily share that directory via a version management system like git. (Or use something like dropbox or google drive, if you don't like having a version management system)
This is an excellent idea and I hope someone sets this up and maintains it. Let me know if you do. For now my own footprints can be found at https://github.com/andete/madparts-parts
This makes sense if you want to start collaborating with other people via a version management system. You don't want to have to merge files each time someone made a change to one footprint.
Each footprint has an unique file name this way. This helps avoiding name clashes if you're working together with other people. In the editor itself the footprints are shown with their name, so you don't have to worry about the file names in practice, except perhaps when doing merges in your version management system.
You can't yet. It is a feature that is planned but not yet there. For now you can export to eagle or kicad and print from there.
There is a #format meta-tag in each footprint. Madparts uses this to use the right version of the utilities code for that particular version of footprint. The current format is 1.2.
Yes.
Yes.
Maybe, one day :)
Use the issue tracker in github.
Milimeters are used everywhere. You can suffix a number with mi or mil for mils and with in for inches. For example 1in, 6mi. Note that no space is allowed between the number and the suffix. These imperial units are just converted back to milimeter in a preprocessor step and the entire program still works with millimeters.