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An interview with David A. Mundie, creator of RxOL - the first programming language for recipes in 1985. He shares his vision of simplifying cooking through technology, his thoughts on recipe formats, and perspectives on the future of kitchen automation.

I experimented a bit with that format and ChatGPT can generate pretty decent results. I described it in a blog https://cooklang.org/blog/03-ai-and-the-evolution-of-recipe-.... Here's a full graph it generated https://cooklang.org/blog/full-recipe-graph.png. I like how it was able to name intermediate nodes.

I'm quite curious to check that out, but seems that the paper I found doesn't have anything about cooking https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2000/0.... Is that the one you had in mind?

Agreed, recipes often need localisation. The language itself agnostic to ingredients and doesn't provide any database. It's up to a user to tag ingredients so tools can recognise them and use in different ways.

It's very easy to update a recipe file in a text format, so there shouldn't be an issue to quickly change names in a recipe you get from your friend overseas.

Thanks, will add the link

Now we have it https://github.com/cooklang/cook-mode

It started as a hobby project to solve my personal needs: I really hate grocery shopping: it's repetitive and takes time. I decided to automate it, but couldn't find any robust tools for that. Also for a long time wanted to create a parser and this was a good opportunity.

Current plan is to offer iOS and Android apps for a one-time fee. These apps are based on open-source language and parser (the same used by CLI), but a bit nicer and user friendlier.

I haven't tried it yet, but there's Swift support for Windows https://swift.org/blog/swift-on-windows/

Yeah, we can only set one title picture for a recipe. Noted down your question.

> Any option to specify that differently as in your seed all files will be in the single folder and there will be mess on file system. I would for instance prefer to have a folder per recipe with cook file and images.

That's a valid point, We assume that people only occasionally add images, but I can imagine its becoming messy. Maybe we should add alternative way. Noted this down as well.

All great ideas, I've taken a note.

I'm not sure about "3. automatically produced different measurements.". What do you mean by that?

Certainly, adding units to roadmap soon as well.

Interesting idea, how about the case when quantity varies for different ingredient? For example 2 tbsp of raw organic cane sugar or 3 honey.

Nice app! Perhaps the app authors can integrate CookLang parser to import recipe files in CookLang.

Wow, that's an amazing link for someone like me who loves cooking pizza!

2 and 3 certainly useful features and some day we'll have it in Cooklang.

As for 1. I had this before in spec:

> To modify the ingredient any other way, use parentheses.

> Add @onions{3}(finely chopped) to the mix...

After some testing, it turned out that it makes the overall cooking flow a bit convoluted. This modifier is an implicit step of the recipe. Imagine that we have this modified ingredient in the middle of a recipe. I have my frying pan full of things and next step is to add onions. But I suddenly realised that it's time to finely chop onions and I don't have time for that.

We can create these steps automatically and place them before everything else, but it may not be always the optimal way.

Here it was removed: https://github.com/cooklang/cooklang-org/commit/1bd2f54c3363...

Agree, this was a last-minute hack. If you have an idea how to rethink this you can share one in a spec repo issues if you don't mind https://github.com/cooklang/spec. Thanks!

I agree, I thought about that. I expect that it can be some cases when either ingredients or units have spaces. And the problem is that I can't come up with a solid counter example. Something like @coriander{2%small batches}... You can open an issue in a spec repo so people can discuss https://github.com/cooklang/spec.

I'd suggest to open an issue for tracking in spec repo https://github.com/cooklang/spec, so people can discuss different options.

Good point, any idea how it could look like?

Great book, thanks for sharing!

certainly!

Nice! I wasn’t aware of that project. It has very similar idea. In cookcli there's a small web server too. It’s not fancy or very developed, but allows to check the recipe or manage shopping list

That was the motivation. I had the same problem that recipes from the apps aren’t localised to local produce. Also sometimes I want to cut corners and do thing easier. I should be able to apply agile and maintain my recipes in my way :-)

You can try to run precompiled Linux binary, it’s statically linked so doesn’t have any dependencies (almost).

Edit. Here is installation instructions https://github.com/cooklang/CookCLI#installation

This release is MVP, to test the waters. If people like the project we will definitely continue to expand to other platforms. I’m not 100% sure but it might work on windows in WSL already.

The parser is hand-made https://github.com/cooklang/CookInSwift. I was reading a book "Crafting Interpreters" by Robert Nystrom (fantastic and atmospheric book!) and was eager to try it myself.

Yeah, the same here :-). We created a placeholder repo https://github.com/cooklang/recipes, but it still subject to workout structure and probably it makes sense to standardise units in some way.

Not yet solid, but there are ideas. For example, define units config in a way like that: "1l | 1000 ml | ...". The first value will be a preferred one and everything else will be converted. What do you think?

Good idea, thank you for sharing