When I can hand the user source code and they can experiment on their own and they don't come back and blame me the engineer who created it for doing something wrong.
There is an inherent disconnect between cooking and programming. In cooking; experimenting and throwing in an extra ingredient or leaving an ingredient out most likely won't cause anything bad to happen to the outcome and it will most likely still be edible.
In programming if the end user leaves out a line of code or doesn't have the correct logic the program will most likely do something it wasn't supposed to and could destroy the users files, could cause them to lose countless hours of work.
Burnt chicken can be thrown out, and you can try again, if your hard drive has been formatted it is going to take a while to get going again. Also, since when is programming, compiling, linking as easy as following a recipe?
Analogies are usually meant to serve a particular purpose. In this case, RMS is using an analogy to make a point about sharing. Do you think that anyone here really confuses cookery with programming?
There is an inherent disconnect between cooking and programming. In cooking; experimenting and throwing in an extra ingredient or leaving an ingredient out most likely won't cause anything bad to happen to the outcome and it will most likely still be edible.
In programming if the end user leaves out a line of code or doesn't have the correct logic the program will most likely do something it wasn't supposed to and could destroy the users files, could cause them to lose countless hours of work.
Burnt chicken can be thrown out, and you can try again, if your hard drive has been formatted it is going to take a while to get going again. Also, since when is programming, compiling, linking as easy as following a recipe?