Analogies From Cookery

Apart from the tech-mainstream uses of "recipe" and "cookbook" as technical terms, there's also:

Taste EarlyAndOften (if producing a product with many components, such as a French apricot tart, engage in UnitTasting?)
ThreeStarRestaurants? has the same connotations to me, negative as well as positive, as ThreeStarProgrammers
- Yeah, but what about 4 or 5 star restaurants?
- CapabilityMaturityModel
ElizabethDavid?'s FrenchProvincialCooking? could be glossed as CookTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork? (and a reaction to BigCuisineUpFront?)
If it smells bad, TossIt

bon appetit!

Cooking also displays the ultimate in PlanToThrowOneAway and EvolutionaryDelivery, but to a large degree deprecates reuse. -- FrankCarver

Depends where you draw the analogy. A recipe is reusable - indeed, recipes evolve and fork like software projects, and exhibit their own PatternLanguage. And if you refactor your fridge mercilessly (on the principle of YouArentGonnaEatIt?) you can end up with a collection of, uh, stock components which can be used both to solve new instances of familiar problems, and as usefully high-level abstractions for the experimentation process that leads to solving new problems.

Many people of my generation learned to program by typing in listings from magazines - not unlike how many people learn to cook. Today magazines have the programs on CD-ROM. Make one person follow a recipe; take another to a restaurant. Both subsist; only one learns how to cook. -- PeterHartley

A friend in the catering industry told me that really is a people business, because almost anyone in the supply chain can mess up your product, so you have to make everyone understand what's important. -- SteveFreeman

It's not often I've wanted to copy verbatim from RecentChanges but this page first appeared as:

AnalogiesFromCookery . . . . . . cinnamon.ant.co.uk

Superb! How did you do that? -- RichardDrake

So who's the DeliaSmith? of software then? I'd nominate EdYourdon as the MrsBeeton?

See also, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, ISBN 0684843285 .

One can take this too literally and program in ChefLanguage.

What cooking and XP have in common, Bakeoff, relationships, receipes and code, etc:

http://www.gladwell.com/2005/2005_09_05_a_bakeoff.html