Shameless self promotion, but you might be interested in scad-clj [0]: a DSL to write OpenSCAD with Clojure. You can get a decent interactive environment combining an editor with an OpenSCAD window set to only show the render [1].

[0] https://github.com/farrellm/scad-clj

[1] https://adereth.github.io/blog/2014/04/09/3d-printing-with-c...

You might also check out ImplicitCAD. Haskell-based. http://www.implicitcad.org/faq

What's so bad about openscad? I haven't really worked with it, so I'm kind of curious.

As far as I remember, the language was severely limited, and it's yet-another-syntax to learn for no discernible benefit.

Ah. Yeah, I can identify. This is exactly the reason I prefer Guix to Nix.