All the techniques you learn from simple knife cuts to measuring to cooking techniques like braising and roasting, all those are object oriented development methods that can be applied to objects, objects of food. There's a lot of object oriented analogies between programming and cooking. If you can apply the "Julienne knife cut" method to a potato object, you can do it to an apple object and probably a carrot too.
Its a big linear programming puzzle to scale recipes. Did I mention scaling? Cooking is a whole barrel of square/cube law scalability puzzles to get cooking rates of different ingredients to intersect at one completion time.
There are some pretty interesting software engineering principles WRT recipe and meal design. Do you "waterfall" your holiday dinner design, or "agile" it?
There's the sheer queueing theory joy of arranging everything just so, such that its all just-in-time ready to be cooked, when it works its awesome and when you're stuck in the weeds its panic time, just like hacking something before a demo.
Its fun to iterate thru optimization getting the "design pattern" applied to the puzzle better and better. And there's so many design patterns, and if you stay out of pastry work, those design patterns are pretty flexible.
One point where you have me is most programmers hate testing, so I can see an issue with cooking.
I am kinda bummed that most "computer geeky" books about cooking fixate solely on gadgetry like liq N2 or molecular gastronomy, cool as that might be, there's a whole nother world of describing cooking with flowcharts and object oriented methods and development models and algorithms and "real computer geeky" stuff like that.
I have noticed that at least some people cook like they program, across a sample size of about 3. Here's to hoping that cooking something never becomes a technical interview fad stunt, although I suppose worse has happened in the past.
At least when I test the code it's not like half of it is gone afterwards like all the cake dough.. and everyone else crowding in to test it too. Cake dough requires rigorous testing, it does.
Cooking is easy. What stumps people is the prep work and cleanup. That's rooted in laziness.
I worked in a kitchen for a bit and I learned how to cook meals the way that restaurants do:
1. Buy everything as fresh as possible.
2. Get your prep work done first.
3. Pre-cook what can be pre-cooked.
4. Don't let anything spoil. Cook what's about to turn. Don't buy more than you will consume or cook for later consumption.
5. Make stuff from scratch. It's cheaper in the long run.
6. Rotate your ingredients and buy what's in season. It's fresher (#1) and cheaper (#5).
If you are a smart chef, you cook on Sundays and Wednesdays. You make more than you need for that day's meal and assemble fresh meals from the cooked ingredients prepared on those days.
It's easy. Buy a pound of bacon and cook the whole pound in the oven at once. Now breakfast is an egg or two in a frying pan on the stove and some bacon reheated in the microwave. Vegetables? Buy a bunch of brocoli, blanch it and put it in the fridge. Buy a bunch of spinach, blanch it and put it in the fridge.
Lunch is precooked chicken breast over blanched vegetables reheated in the microwave. Add rice you've pre-cooked if that's your thing.
Dinner is a salad and protein that's reheated. Chicken/beef/whatever.
Food isn't hard. I spend less than 4 hours cooking per week and I eat super healthy using only fresh ingredients I buy at Whole Foods and the local natural market. Grass-fed beef, marinated chicken, etc.
The only reason people in their 20's haven't learned to live this way is because nobody has ever made it a priority for them. The plethora of fast-food, college meal-plans, and bar-food/takeout have made it possible for a 20-something to never be hungry but instead chronically malnourished.
Seriously, you can code C++ but Rachel Rae is better in the kitchen? WTF? This stuff isn't rocket science.
In many ways cooking is a form of "hacking" and creating, a form of human ingenuity that has very concrete and practical applications...
You take raw materials, in themselves nutritious but unappetizing, and create a final product that looks and feel completely different, and manages to be satisfying in addition to being functional and necessary to survival.
Making something like bread starting from flour, yeast and water... what a brilliant hack!
Since I have started looking at cooking from this point of view I have been hooked.
I have to wonder about this. Granted, many of my friends are in their late twenties, but the programmers I know are overwhelmingly more likely to cook than people I know from similar demographics in different occupations.
Perhaps -- assuming the cooking phobia does indeed exist -- it's something more specific to the kind of people who gravitate towards HN than it is an attribute of 20-something computer nuts.
If you think about the main demographic of HN - people in their 20s who have spent more time with computers than anything else - it makes sense. :)