(Edit: I thought those rejections were genuine. Nevertheless, my point stands. Kudos to the author for the vivid illustration of this infuriating bias.)<p>> <i>Structured programming is a nice academic exercise, which works well for small examples, but I doubt that any real-world program will ever be written in such a style.</i><p>This is not the first time I recall hearing this fallacious argument. If something works better than the "standard" approach for toy examples, the correct answer is to investigate, especially if you can't explain <i>how</i> the new approach would break down when actually used in the "real world".<p>Sure, an intuition that it wouldn't work is evidence against the new approach, but (i) this intuition may be motivated by the refusal to change habits, and (ii) toy examples that work is a stronger evidence in favour of the new approach anyway. Not definite, just stronger than intuition.