It's a different experience. POV-Ray is basically a programming language. If you want to generate geometry programmatically there's nothing quite like it. The "programming" features are primitive ("if" statements, loops, eventually they added macros that act like procedure calls...) but the way you describe geometry and textures is actually pretty nice.
POV-Ray is also very old. Turner Whitted's recursive ray tracing paper is from 1979. POV-Ray was released in 1991, but was based on an earlier raytracer called DKBTrace that was written sometime in the 80's. Blender is more modern and isn't built around the limitations of what was feasible to render in a reasonable amount of time on the computers of the 80's and 90's.
Comments
It's a different experience. POV-Ray is basically a programming language. If you want to generate geometry programmatically there's nothing quite like it. The "programming" features are primitive ("if" statements, loops, eventually they added macros that act like procedure calls...) but the way you describe geometry and textures is actually pretty nice.
POV-Ray is also very old. Turner Whitted's recursive ray tracing paper is from 1979. POV-Ray was released in 1991, but was based on an earlier raytracer called DKBTrace that was written sometime in the 80's. Blender is more modern and isn't built around the limitations of what was feasible to render in a reasonable amount of time on the computers of the 80's and 90's.
Programming is nice but for geometry you want a constraint solver.