Works well when explaining open source too. Proprietary is when the restaurants don't disclose the recipe, you just hope that they'll do a good job like last time, or that your allergies don't trigger. Government is forcing food products to disclose at least parts of their recipe, making it partially open. GPL needs you to include the recipe along with the food you serve to people, but not when you cook at home. And so on

Yes, that's how I usually explain programming to someone unexperienced with it. A computer programming language is usually more strictly defined, but depending on compiler and architecture results can differ in computer progamming as well.

Speaking of which, a spec for recipes that was a previous Show HN[1], Cooklang[2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28997309

[2] https://github.com/cooklang/spec

This is especially true with the programming language Chef: https://esolangs.org/wiki/chef

I wish emacs would implement kitchen-sink support already.

You will not be surprised to learn of the existence of org-chef, a package to help writing recipes in org-mode.

I've been using Emacs for over 20 years, and even I thought you were joking before I web-searched org-chef!

Oh ye of little faith!

So why is code copyrightable and software patentable, while recipes are neither?

Because corporations get to make money from software.

Or at least pseudocode - it fulfills the same purpose but is less formal/consistent than for example the esoteric programming language Chef.

Indeed, and just like code you hate the way it looks a few days later.

Glad to see this already pointed out!