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Comment by T-zex | Hacker News Reader

Please do not compare coding to cooking.

Please justify why you think it's a bad comparison?

I think it's apt. Cooking shares many qualities with coding, you're under time deadlines to produce something for a end consumer (for the most part). There's lots of competing methods and you have to select which ones work best for the product you want to produce.

Most importantly you can cook something amazing that everyone loves, or a charred lump that no one will touch. Much the same as coding.

Rule 11213: First person to mention "time" when linked article does not include the term "time" takes 1 step backward, 1 step forward, 2 steps backward, 1 step forward, 3 steps back. Back to the future.

I was expanding on the concept and seem to have fallen into a time warp.

Coding doesn't necessarily involve time deadlines, and maybe cooking doesn't either, although it seems to. I agree with the rest of what you said though.

I know, which is why I said '(for the most part)'. 80%+ there's some kind of tangible time limit on what you're trying to achieve. Be it self-imposed or otherwise.

I really liked the comparison with cooking, I think the same way you do! You don't learn how to code to become a professional programmer!

>I think it's apt. Cooking shares many qualities with coding, you're under time deadlines to produce something for a end consumer (for the most part).

A, you mean like hundreds of other professions...

Sure, but I was talking specifically about the 'don't compare coding and cooking'. We can abstract it into a reusable template.

Cooking is way more simple compared to programming. The recipes are easily understood - a complete opposite to software specs.

Cooking does not evolve that fast compared to programming. Everybody loves their grandma's pie.

And most important cooking is manufacturing and programming is designing. Regular cooking is trying to reproduce something that was done as close as possible, while programming involves dealing with lots of specifics.

Please do not compare cooking to heating up food...

Really? I think the molecular gastronomy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_gastronomy) chefs would disagree with you about that.

The argument still holds, programming can be ridiculously simplistic and so can cooking.

Few reasons: - Scalability issues - Confidence level in effort estimation - Resource planning (team may not be co-located)

Both are life skills and that is the context.

No, it's a great analogy. Being able to whip up a delicious meal for 2 in your kitchen doesn't translate into being able to feed a banquet of 500.

While hardly isomorphic, for the purpose of the analogy I think the comparison works well.

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