My friend in Chicago said coding was 'just like following a recipe' and I'm still mad about it.

I mean, I spent a whole weekend stuck on a simple loop problem, and that comment made me feel like an idiot for struggling. Has anyone else had someone say something that just totally missed the point of how hard this can be?

2 comments

2 Comments

schmidt.reese8d ago

Yeah, the "just like following a recipe" thing misses so much. Recipes don't have bugs where your cake explodes because you used a comma wrong. It's more like trying to write a recipe for a robot that has zero common sense.

finley_lee8d ago

Exactly, and that robot would probably try to bake the cookbook. The recipe comparison always falls apart because a human can see a step like "fold in the eggs" and understand what that means. You're right, @schmidt.reese, it's about missing common sense. The program has no idea what you want, it just does exactly what you told it to do, even if that instruction is nonsense. So you end up writing pages of steps to cover every single tiny thing a person would just know.