Fluidity of Grasshopper versus the Rigidity of Digital Project

When designing parametrically, grasshopper and digital project both provide a similar means to an end.  Bot forms of software give the user a way to change a single element in the design and thus affect the way the rest of the model reacts to it.  How these programs preform this action is where their differences take place.

            Grasshopper bases the inputs off of buttons and relationships between various plugins.  In this manner, various model instances such as lines, surfaces, or BReps can be plugged into different buttons at any time to create different effects.  In this manner, the order in which the model is constructed is not rigidly defined.  There is a type of fluidity to grasshopper that allows for a certain amount of experimentation and trial and error that is not found in digital project.

            Digital project differs from grasshopper in the way that everything that is created in the program is based off of a geometry or instance that precedes it.  Surfaces that are created in the software are based off of curves, which are based off of points.  When changing something in a model that is constructed in this manner, a small change can dramatically change the way pieces are shaped.  These changes can even be so great that they cannot be implemented with the determined parameters.  It is because of this that digital project is more suited to determining a more structural approach to modeling than grasshopper is.