> yeah, like wasting time in trial-and-error steps entering lots of points 
> by hand as well as the always annoying internal points in the lathe... I 
> find more fun to program in Brainf*ck...

To be fair I must admit that sometimes I have done this manually
for cubic splines by sketching a profile onto graph paper then
entering the data. It's not really that hard to come up with a couple
extra control points when the rest are on the curve.

Bezier curves are a different matter, it's very difficult to visuallize
where all the control points should be without some feedback,
at least for complex curves. For simple curves they're just
tangent to the normal, with the magnitude controlling the flatness,
that's OK manually if the normal is along an axis.

There's really two ways to go about making a scene, one is
to do sketches on paper (or mentally if you can visualize well),
then try to make your scene match. Somethime text entry is a
fast way to put your picture into SDL.

The other method is to create your scene on the computer in
the first place, and modify it until it looks good. A GUI can
make this method fast, since it helps visualize the scene.

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