Comments on: Cooking as Coding

By: alexnberra

alexnberra — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:59:45 +0000

Samidh,
Just discovered your blog via Facebook. Looks like you started up recently with it. This post is great for my friend who is writes code and is an avid chef, I passed the link along him.

Lots of ideas in your writing, I like it, very in-depth, makes me think. Let’s see some posts with pictures!

Hope you are well, running, sunning, funning, in Spring.

-Alex

By: Matthew W

Matthew W — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:18:05 +0000

Paul: touché!

Think you might have been taking his analogies a bit too literally.

Both are disciplines where there’s a strong component of technical knowledge and technical skills, but also a significant element of creativity in how they’re used. Not the same by any means, but broadly similar enough to be able to appeal to a similar range of personalities.

By: Paul Grayson

Paul Grayson — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 05:21:20 +0000

As someone who has done ruby, C#, and Bechamel today, I couldn’t disagree more! The two disciplines are only about as related as any two creative activities. Coding is fundamentally objective and unforgiving, while cooking is fundamentally subjective and forgiving. Leave out a single semicolon and your program does not compile; forget to reset a variable and people can die. There are few recipes that produce dangerous results if the ingredients are added in the wrong order, and doubling or quadrupling the quantities of various ingredients is purely a matter of taste. A subtle reordering of steps in cooking will never let you produce exactly the same dish a thousand times faster; but that is typical of coding.

You say cooking is based the science of chemistry, and this is vaguely true, though pretty much no cooks know it, there is very little knowledge brought in from science into the kitchen, and chemical reactions or interactions between multiple ingredients are rare. Let’s say I like cooking bread and know pretty much nothing of the science. Can you name a single scientific fact that will greatly improve my bread?

Coding, on the other hand, is almost totally separated from the physical world – it is much closer to mathematics than to science. Show me one place where knowledge obtained with the scientific method has an influence on computer programming! Try imagining an alternate universe where salt is not used in cooking – that’s easy! Now try imagining an alternate universe where loops are not used in programming – that’s very, very hard!

There are far too many people who think that coding is like cooking – they want to throw a bunch of tasty bits and pieces of code into a file without understanding any of them, stir well, and get something delicious out. It does not work that way.

By: novalis

novalis — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:12:20 +0000

Hi. I'm another programmer-cook, and I agree that there is some slight overlap in skills. There are actually books other than McGee's that offer scientific information. Here are two on confections and bread, both of which I own and learned a lot from. There's also the more formula-based approach of Ruhlman.

By: Matthew W

Matthew W — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:04:10 +0000

As a developer and a cook I couldn’t agree more.

I would also like to see more flexible recipes which reveal a bit more about the structure of the cooking that’s being done:

* Explain why certain ingredients techniques are used
* Explain which ingredients or techniques are critical to the recipe and which are less critical
* Where an ingredient is only used as an arbitrary choice from some class of suitable ingredients, explain this
* Explain how the recipe varies when certain parameters (eg cooking time, temperature, ratios of certain ingredients) are tweaked, that is, describe the neighbourhood of your recipe in n-dimensional phase space :)