Here's a thought. You say cooking feels like coding to you. It doesn't at all to me. One major difference for me is that when you make a change while coding,

Here's a thought. You say cooking feels like coding to you. It doesn't at all to me. One major difference for me is that when you make a change while coding, you can see instantly what the difference is; there's no delay. In cooking, you often have to wait for minutes after a change to see if it was a good change. But after thinking about that, it dawns on me that cooking is like coding, if you're using a language that requires a separate compile step. I've always avoided those languages (all my experience is in interpreted languages, except for CL, which still has no requirement for a length compile step). Anyway, less fancifully, I think there's a culture difference, here. If you grew up in a house where there was always a hundred things you could nuke for breakfast, why would you ever learn to cook unless you were especially interested in one dish that had to be cooked? Lastly, I was a nerd when growing up, and we were pretty much the poorest people in the trailer park. My father knew how to cook hamburger helper and most anything else with instructions on the box or can, but I cook far more than he did when I was growing up. There's still always a strong temptation to just grab a bag of chips instead of making a meal, but my wife gets unhappy if I do that more than once or twice a week. :)