Despite your assertion that the "grandma" mode of knitting isn't programming and mostly doesn't innovate, that (rather more diverse than assumed) community is r

Despite your assertion that the "grandma" mode of knitting isn't programming and mostly doesn't innovate, that (rather more diverse than assumed) community is responsible for the vast majority of new patterns and often experiments extensively. I think it's great that more (computer) geeks are getting into fields that have always had a high geek percentage and you can definitely make it a really geeky endeavor, but there's a lot of wheel reinvention and failure to RTFM. Fun, definitely worth doing as a learning experience, but perhaps we shouldn't be so much with the patting each other on the back and insularity. For that matter computer geeks aren't even in the running for geekiest approach to knitting - for that you have to go to the heavy math folks. It's intellectually, visually, and tactilely beautiful stuff. Also you know appear to know little about real world cooking outside of a recent, highly-distorted, and publishing industry-driven world view. Recipes may list precise ingredient measurements (though most don't), but they're rarely intended to be used as-is and there's huge variation in detail. Even more so, almost all cuisines are more a collection of common techniques and ingredients than a set of well-defined dishes, with much regional variation, and huge historical change. Most European-descended Americans and much of Europe use a _tiny_ subset of the ingredients our ancestors did and have completely dropped entire genres of food. Just take a look at the actual variety of citrus fruits versus what we use and the huge range of uses they were put to. It's like someone decided Java was the only programming language, the standard library was the only library allowed, and btw we needed to get rid of half the syntax! In that metaphor you're lionizing a couple of programmers for making the jump to Objective-C or C# while somehow overlooking the vast majority of programmers using everything from for decades Perl to ML and mixing things up left and right. Yeah, a lot of chefs & professional cooks (these are terms of art, not just a fame thing) try new things... and no, they're not even close to the only people doing so. In fact it's mostly a recent thing that chefs are innovators, for a very long time they were the ones working precisely to recipe. Consider the formalization of French haute cuisine by Antonin Carême & Georges Escoffier and the subsequent rigid adherence even now. Try learning cooking from a cook - not a book - experimenting for yourself, and reading one of the many books like "Cookwise" that actually get into what happens and how to change it. It's the antithesis of hacking to assume there's nothing to learn and no room for experimenting!