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I meant that they should write down these trivial things once in a standard, and later just refer to it in every recipe in two words. This spec already contains

by senki 16y ago

I meant that they should write down these trivial things once in a standard, and later just refer to it in every recipe in two words. This spec already contains references to several federal and military standards, but clearly not enough. Thats why it's such a bloated piece of sh... paper.

Dove 16y ago
Ah. Well, in this case, they kind of did that: 3.2 Ingredients. All ingredients shall be clean, sound, wholesome, and free from foreign material, evidence of rodent or insect infestation, extraneous material, off-odors, off-flavors, and off-colors. 3.2.1 Sugar. Sugar shall be white, refined, granulated, cane or beet sugar. Powdered sugar of equivalent quality may be substituted for part of the granulated sugar in the brownie formula to control spread. 3.2.2 Oatmeal. Oatmeal shall be the commercial product known as quick cooking oatmeal. It shall have natural rolled oat flavor and odor and shall be clean and free from burned particles, rancid, musty, sour, or other undesirable flavors and odors. . . . They factored out the "all ingredients" part of the standard. You know, I'm sorry to admit, but I've written these things before. There's a real tradeoff to make there. On the one hand, there's a virtuous impulse to do as much factoring as you can so you don't have to write things twice--or heaven forbid, update them multiple times when they change. On the other hand, you then find yourself calling for MIL-STD-340985 sugar and MIL-STD-320598 flour and MIL-STD-24098 molasses with deviations allowed to items 4, 5, and 9 of paragraph 6 when using process B of MIL-STD-32409 Baking Instructions. And there's sort of a desire by users of the document not to need to have twenty books open at once just to figure out if they can use this flour or not. Writing this sort of thing well is a lot harder than you would think. Edit: Upon reflection, there's a real parallel between that and walking the fine line between copypasta code and spaghetti abstraction.

by senki 16y ago

Dove 16y ago

Ah. Well, in this case, they kind of did that: 3.2 Ingredients. All ingredients shall be clean, sound, wholesome, and free from foreign material, evidence of rodent or insect infestation, extraneous material, off-odors, off-flavors, and off-colors. 3.2.1 Sugar. Sugar shall be white, refined, granulated, cane or beet sugar. Powdered sugar of equivalent quality may be substituted for part of the granulated sugar in the brownie formula to control spread. 3.2.2 Oatmeal. Oatmeal shall be the commercial product known as quick cooking oatmeal. It shall have natural rolled oat flavor and odor and shall be clean and free from burned particles, rancid, musty, sour, or other undesirable flavors and odors. . . . They factored out the "all ingredients" part of the standard. You know, I'm sorry to admit, but I've written these things before. There's a real tradeoff to make there. On the one hand, there's a virtuous impulse to do as much factoring as you can so you don't have to write things twice--or heaven forbid, update them multiple times when they change. On the other hand, you then find yourself calling for MIL-STD-340985 sugar and MIL-STD-320598 flour and MIL-STD-24098 molasses with deviations allowed to items 4, 5, and 9 of paragraph 6 when using process B of MIL-STD-32409 Baking Instructions. And there's sort of a desire by users of the document not to need to have twenty books open at once just to figure out if they can use this flour or not. Writing this sort of thing well is a lot harder than you would think. Edit: Upon reflection, there's a real parallel between that and walking the fine line between copypasta code and spaghetti abstraction.