I agree Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces is not quite compelling, but I do find it interesting. Another approach to it is: what makes stories memora

I agree Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces is not quite compelling, but I do find it interesting. Another approach to it is: what makes stories memorable, stirring etc? Why are some stories forgetable, boring, unengaging? It has a similar perspective to the question: what makes a tune catchy? It's not about the story or tune, but the human processing system, as lossy image compression algorithms model the HVS. Though of course there's extrinsic factors as in market success: the need it fulfills (e.g. identification with a particular cultural group), surface factors, fashion, luck etc, I do think there's something to the story/tune itself. Getting back to "lore", my last resort is to look up its meaning: a body of traditions and knowledge on a subject or held by a particular group, typically passed from person to person by word of mouth. Not stories or personages at all! For coding, it could include rules of thumbs and aphorisms like the first rule of optimisation, premature optimisation, divide and conquer, YAGNI, etc. The analogous coders of lore might be the implicit originator of those aphorisms (like the sage of the tao te ching), and attributed authors like Knuth are just a connecting link. This would be in a similar category to folk wisdom and old wive's tales, that often turn out to have something to them, even when their explicit reasoning is illogical or clearly wrong. It's often passed on because - for whatever reason - things turn out better when following it.