> I think about this constantly while reading Hacker News. So many articles and comments by people whose level of enthusiasm doesn't match their experience.

Years ago I attended a small code conference in my city; just a general "programmers hang out and give talks type of thing".

Someone gave a presentation about Scala (I think it was Scala anyway); it was a general introduction explaining the semantics, ideas, syntax, etc. At the end someone asked a question: "In our experience [some practical problem they encountered, I forgot what exactly], how do you deal with this"?

"Oh, we haven't really used Scala in production, I just learned it; I don't really know".