HPR3386: What's for dinner?

Overview

I live on my own, but I cook for members of my family from time to time. Each week we all get together and cook dinner for Wednesday and Thursday. I usually do the cooking but we are starting to share these duties for certain meals.

In 2019 I thought it would be useful if I had some sort of random chooser to decide what next week’s meal was going to be. I wrote a Bash script called choose_meal, using a simple CSV file of meal names and the date last eaten to avoid choosing the same one too often. The shortcomings of this approach soon became apparent!

It wasn’t long before choose_meal was rewritten in Perl. This time I decided to use a database, and chose SQLite to create it. My database contained just two tables, one for the meals themselves (called slightly confusingly 'meal_history'), and another for a record of the choices made (called 'meal_log') – the ability to produce historical reports seemed like a desirable feature!

In 2019 the design of this system was very specific to our needs: one choice per week on a Wednesday. It was not something that could be used by anyone else – which seemed like a bad idea.

In late 2020 and early 2021 the system was redesigned, as will be discussed in the detailed notes. In May 2021 a more general design was added to the public GitLab repository and the preparation of this show was begun.

I had never intended this system to hold recipes. This was partly because I have built a collection of recipes I have constructed from various sources and amended as I have made them. I print these and keep them in a ring-binder for reference as I cook. In some cases the meals described in the database are multi-component ones (such as the dishes that make up a curry for example), so it doesn’t seem appropriate to hold these here.

I might rethink this in the future however.

Long notes

Follow this link to read the detailed notes associated with this episode.

Links

• Perl

  • Perl 5: (currently v5.35.0)
  • Raku: originally called Perl 6, a totally different scripting language.
  • Perl 7: updates to Perl 5, removal of some historical stuff

• SQLite: a C-language library that implements a small, fast, self-contained, high-reliability, full-featured, SQL database engine.

• GitLab repository for Weekly Menus

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