Simple: cooking is extremely relatable. Everybody has prepared food at some point. And it's easy for people to tell - crucially, in a half-hour TV show - that

Simple: cooking is extremely relatable. Everybody has prepared food at some point. And it's easy for people to tell - crucially, in a half-hour TV show - that a star chef is doing amazing things with food. Programming is just the opposite: inaccessible to non-programmers, very specialized, very technical, abstract.