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Comment by RaptorJ | Hacker News Reader

This is an unfortunate analogy given how complicated and poorly understood the heat-affects-food chemical reactions are. And yet food gets cooked.

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I'd say that makes it an apt analogy.

It just makes a point opposite to the author's intent.

Are you sure about the author’s intent? Unless you know the writer very, very well, I think it’s impossible to tell from written text.

You make an excellent point. I shouldn't have been sure about the author's intent.

Thank you for pointing out my error.

Exactly, you don't need to know how molecules act under the hood to be productive cooking.

Until you need to substitute ingredients, you use a different type or rangetop, the pan metal or thickness is different, or something else changes. This was a perfect analogy. People can follow the recipe of assemling various frameworks and toolkits to create software, but they will eventually encounter difficulty.

You may not need to understand molecular differences, but knowing hows fats, proteins, and carbs work, along with how to substitute ingredients, and different theories of cooking all help to actually understand why you can cook until mysteriously things don't work the same as yesterday.

I've been learning to cook recently and I haven't the slightest idea how heat affects food.

It is said that each fold on a chef's hat represents a different way they know how to cook an egg. Thet need to understand when to apply low heat, high heat, add liquids, when proteins denature and when they coagulate.

Of course, following a recipe in specific ideal circumstances works, as long as nothing changes.

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