>Tamar on the other hand, chocked the article up to being conceptual, one that is meant to help people read the help files and so forth. In other words, the intent apparently was not practical.

>Again, folks who hang their hat on concepts, in reality, use it as a stop gap for the lack of experience they have.

Without commenting on Miriam's article (I haven't read it), I'll chime in and say I think that this your statements above are narrow-minded. If you are stating that conceptual articles are worthless (I think that's what I'm interpreting from your statements, and other similar statement in previous messages), then that's hogwash. I have learned a heck of a lot from conceptual articles and lectures.

You don't need a code sample to get some points across. Some subjects don't easily lend themselves to concise code samples. It's silly to discount an article or lecture just because the author or speaker didn't present code samples, or the samples didn't cover every detail of the technology or concept. Did you ever learn anything from a Design-pattern lecture, article or book? This is one subject where code samples are small and rare. Regardless of whether you learned anything or not, lots of people have, and they have even generated some pretty interesting discussions here. There are tons of valuable books and articles I can think of that either had no code samples, or the code samples were in a language I don't know, so they were next to useless to me. YMMV.

>Based on some of the truthful answers you should get, it should quickly become obvious that many of these folks have zero business at the podium.

I disagree here too. A speaker's value at the podium is a function of how much they know about a subject and how skilled they are at helping others to understand it. Their practical experience is only relevant when their lack of it gets in the way of answering practical questions. If a speaker knows enough about a subject to answer all of my questions accurately, I could give a rat's ass if he's ever deployed it in production. And no one else should care either.
Conversely, there are speakers out there that really know their stuff all the way around, but have no business on the podium, because they have no concept of what it takes to get a point across clearly. Whether they mumble, don't speak the common language, or don't have an appreciation for the facets of human nature involved in the learning process, some experts don't belong behind the podium.

There are fields of science where not one person on earth has "practical" experience or proof of concept, but some are still accurately labelled experts in the subject because they have studied the matter more extensively than anyone else.

(Stumbles off soapbox...)