Part of the problem is that some of this stuff has a pretty short shelf life. There's a lot of optimization knowledge that was useful at one time but is now flat out wrong.
Oral culture is especially prone to this -- at least a blog post or a physical book has a date on it. You have no idea when the your co-worker's suggested optimization technique was developed.
Re:Efficient music players remain elusive
by vinceguidry on Monday June 26, 2017 @09:23AM
(#14636576)
I think 'theory' is just fine, you can't fix all communication failures by throwing moar words at it. At some point you have to make peace with the fact that not everybody uses words the same way you do.
Re:Efficient music players remain elusive
by yellowapple on Monday June 26, 2017 @10:27AM
(#14637045)
"what's the word for this?"
I think the word (or phrase, rather) is "tribal knowledge".
I think you may have hit a linguistic snag here; there's lots of "theory" in the classical CS sense dealing with performance from an O(n) point of view, such as Knuth's work. But for producing fast results on actual hardware you end up having to take into account lots of ugly details of the platform. Learning about cache behaviour doesn't really fit into CS so it's not the first thing people think of when you ask for theory.
"Knowledge transmitted by practitioners through written and oral culture outside of the academy": what's the word for this?