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Consider how much comic writers can assume about interpretation strategies (see McCloud’s _Understanding Comics) and - in a way - back story. Or, the more usual example, how writers in the 1800’s could assume an educated reader was familiar with the Bible, other works in the canon. So they could make terse references, confident that, oh, a scene where a character in crisis falls into a river and rises up will bring echoes of baptism to mind. 

That was one of the threads in the late, lamented Master of Fine Arts in Software idea: teaching great or typical works to build such a tight community.

Someone should do something like this at a Ruby or Rails conf.