I think you mean "trade or craft"; "tradecraft" means "spying" (in my experience).

"Tradecraft" is a general word meaning "the craft-knowledge involved in a trade"; it just isn't very well-used out of a few specific contexts.

"Craftwork" is another such word, being "the craft produced as the work of a trade, or the process of applying one's craftsmanship to produce work."

Both, I think, are useful in a programming context. As programmers, we do craftwork, and we need to know our tradecraft to do it well--where tradecraft is separate from plain fact-knowledge (it's more a set of intuitions picked up with experience), but is also separate from raw craftsmanship (which is composed of things like willingness-to-say-no-when-told-to-ship-something-unmaintainable, but which doesn't cover the trade-specific knowledge required to say what "unmaintainable" looks like.)

"Uncle" Bob Martin's writings about code craftsmanship (http://blog.8thlight.com/uncle-bob/archive.html) are exactly that--teaching coders about what craftsmanship, in general, is. He doesn't really talk about tradecraft, just about encouraging coders--who already have implicitly learned tradecraft--that they should be considering themselves craftsmen, and applying their tradecraft.

On the other hand, for all the twee style of The Codeless Code (http://thecodelesscode.com/), it's basically a set of parables that do teach tradecraft.

> "Tradecraft" is a general word meaning "the craft-knowledge involved in a trade"; it just isn't very well-used out of a few specific contexts.

I don't understand the relevance of "trade" to this discussion. It's just craft, or craft-knowledge, if you prefer.

I disagree that "tradecraft" is still so general. I agree "craftsmanship" has no such connotations.

I spent 12 years in the Air Force, the last 4 in an intel unit writing software to analyze radar signal intercepts. I've never heard the word tradecraft used to mean anything intel-related, although Google tells me that it is used that way. It may be more common in some intel communities than others, but I'd venture to guess that if you did a survey the large majority of folks in the general population will have no idea about the intel-related usage of the word.

I wasn't particularly claiming it was used by a large portion of those in intelligence; my claim was that it was an overwhelmingly large portion of the uses of the term, and those familiar with it at all (and not just guessing the meaning based on the fact that it's made up of two familiar words) are most likely to have heard about it in Burn Notice (which apparently had ~5 million viewers) or read it in a Tom Clancy novel (of which there may be 100 million copies in print), if they didn't read it in a recent Al Jazeera or Washington Post headline.