ive also seen programming compared to cooking, and i think thats a really unfortunate comparison. programming is not like cooking. i *wish* programming was like cooking. its kind of the opposite.

when cooking, most things you do are fine. you can substitute most ingredients in a recipe and still get something 1) edible and 2) probably delicious. recipe calls for seasoning salt but youre out? just fucking use something else and it will probably be fine. thats amazing!

when programming, you can follow a "recipe" to the fucking letter and get nothing. maybe some package versions changed. maybe they never tested on your OS. maybe you dont have an environment variable set. who knows. my first-try success rate w building shit from source is ~40%

and forget about swapping shit in and out. if something asks for a particular json library, you absolutely cannot use another json library. you probably can't use different versions of that same json library. you *absolutely* cannot use a yaml library! chance of success is zero.

thats like if a recipe called for minced garlic, but if you use diced garlic everything turns to mud. thats like if a recipe called for 1/3 cup of rice but if you used 1/4 cup of rice what comes out is ashes.

its not that cooking is "easier" than programming. theyre totally different activities with totally different tolerances. tolerances while cooking are super wide and allow for improvisation and personalization. coding by comparison basically has no tolerances.

i dont know what set this off