It's not just being able to demonstrate the benefits empirically, but the combination of that with constantly loudly touting them. When someone thinks their ha

It's not just being able to demonstrate the benefits empirically, but the combination of that with constantly loudly touting them. When someone thinks their hashmap is faster in theory they get asked to benchmark it... it often isn't in practice. But when someone decides that some norm in whitespace, use of parenthesis, or use favored control-flow concepts will result in a lower defect rate or reduced maintenance costs we somehow are expected to accept these conclusions without clear evidence. Even though everywhere is in computer science where we can easily measure results there are countless examples of theoretically better stuff that works less well in practice. Why should we expect our intuition on human interactions to be any better than our intuitions over which data structures are faster?