> very little of it is written down

> and papers to absorb it.

I smell a contradiction. But I'm glad that even well-known industry people see it like that. It's not a common flu you can pick up at university library. It's an arcane lore you need to travel faraway to dig into ruins of Library of Alexandria to find the knowledge of.

I don't see the contradiction - very little of it is written down, and so you need to spend a lot of time scraping around for the disparate parts that are written down and trying to absorb as much as possible for them. There are very few (in some parts of the field none) books that bring together all the information.

Good, good. Reminds me that stealing your https://rubybib.org/ idea for Python is on my todo list for long time ...

Actually, my own ref to the Library of Alexandria, initially done for a word of mouth, is a literal situation in some parts of the realm. Reminds me I wanted to put up a mirror of Rice' Massively Scalar Compiler Project materials somewhere. In my mental map, Cooper and guys literally saved SSA from IBM's freezing hell (quoting Kenneth Zadeck: "What Happened Next / We stopped working on SSA. / None of us actually worked on a compiler project. / We were blocked from transfering SSA to the IBM product compilers.").

Really should do that on winter holidays. By that time, we'll also know if http://ssabook.gforge.inria.fr/latest/ actually have gone down. But at least that is already mirrored...