An interview with David A. Mundie, creator of RxOL - the first programming language for recipes in 1985. He shares his vision of simplifying cooking through technology, his thoughts on recipe formats, and perspectives on the future of kitchen automation.
Agreed, recipes often need localisation. The language itself agnostic to ingredients and doesn't provide any database. It's up to a user to tag ingredients so tools can recognise them and use in different ways.
It's very easy to update a recipe file in a text format, so there shouldn't be an issue to quickly change names in a recipe you get from your friend overseas.
It started as a hobby project to solve my personal needs: I really hate grocery shopping: it's repetitive and takes time. I decided to automate it, but couldn't find any robust tools for that. Also for a long time wanted to create a parser and this was a good opportunity.
Current plan is to offer iOS and Android apps for a one-time fee. These apps are based on open-source language and parser (the same used by CLI), but a bit nicer and user friendlier.
Yeah, we can only set one title picture for a recipe. Noted down your question.
> Any option to specify that differently as in your seed all files will be in the single folder and there will be mess on file system. I would for instance prefer to have a folder per recipe with cook file and images.
That's a valid point, We assume that people only occasionally add images, but I can imagine its becoming messy. Maybe we should add alternative way. Noted this down as well.
2 and 3 certainly useful features and some day we'll have it in Cooklang.
As for 1. I had this before in spec:
> To modify the ingredient any other way, use parentheses.
> Add @onions{3}(finely chopped) to the mix...
After some testing, it turned out that it makes the overall cooking flow a bit convoluted. This modifier is an implicit step of the recipe. Imagine that we have this modified ingredient in the middle of a recipe. I have my frying pan full of things and next step is to add onions. But I suddenly realised that it's time to finely chop onions and I don't have time for that.
We can create these steps automatically and place them before everything else, but it may not be always the optimal way.
Agree, this was a last-minute hack. If you have an idea how to rethink this you can share one in a spec repo issues if you don't mind https://github.com/cooklang/spec. Thanks!
I agree, I thought about that. I expect that it can be some cases when either ingredients or units have spaces. And the problem is that I can't come up with a solid counter example. Something like @coriander{2%small batches}... You can open an issue in a spec repo so people can discuss https://github.com/cooklang/spec.
