I can't imagine using the words concise and Ada in the same sentence. .
Not concise in spelling out the details of some low-level module, but very concise for higher-level programming, because it made you be precise when implementing the components.
Once you've worked in an area for several years you end up with a good collection of libraries with clean interfaces, and you find yourself throwing very complex programs together with simple code that "just works", rather than the spaghettied jazzturbation that you usually see when people use other languages.
No reason you can't write clean complex programs in the language of your choice; it's just that Ada won't let you be a slouch. It makes you do the details right, but once you've done that you can forget the details and deal with concepts instead.
Admittedly, I used it at the hobbyist level for several years before I realized how to do that.
Granted GCC is not the only compiler but my memory is that Ada's compiler were expensive whereas C++'s compilers less so which explain (partly) why Ada is much less widespread than C++ nowadays. Back in the day, Digital (DEC) had a very nice Ada compiler for VMS and whatever they called their flavor of UNIX. (ULTRIX?) And it was indeed pretty expensive.
IMHO, the DOD should have invested in making a Free Ada compiler to create a community of Ada users in order to ensure that Ada would become widespread, to secure his investment in Ada's code. They naively assumed everyone would jump on it because they wanted people to use it. There was a "mandate" to use it, but a loophole that allowed granting exceptions. Everyone requested exceptions, because they couldn't find programmers who wanted to learn a new language that requires an unaccustomed level of self-discipline to use. So they rolled back the mandate.
Granted, forcing a language on everyone probably wasn't a smart move, even if the language is really good (as some of us think Ada is). But having made that decision, ISTM that they should have stuck to their guns rather than giving in to the whining.
IIRC, the now-familiar GPL'd gnat compiler was one of the earliest Ada compilers, funded at NYU by the military. As others have mentioned, it is now fully integrated into the GNU Compiler Collection (gcc). I don't know how useful it was back in the old days.
Ada was designed to control "things that can't fail" like aircraft flight controls and nucear power plants, guidance systems of "smart bombs" and soon. Must people don't work in this area. Most people write stuff that runs on desktop machines and web servers. In that environment software error is just expected and tolerated. And that attitude is exactly why the world is filled with crapware.
We should expect software to work correctly, and take our business elsewhere when it doesn't.
No one dies if your kitchen faucet squirts the water out sideways, but we don't just shrug it off and live with it.
Has anyone else started to notice an ADA resurgence? s/ADA/Ada/ -- It's a proper name rather than an acronym. (It refers to Ada Lady Lovelace, Charles Babbage's assistant.)
It seems to be popular in France, presumably because the guy who invented it was French. (No, it wasn't designed by a committee. It was selected via a competition for a language to satisfy a rich set of requirements, with special attention to support for embedded programming.)
For those who aren't familiar with it, it's very similar to Pascal, but has a lot more features. Things like multithreading are integral to the language - not a common thing when it came out in '83.
And when other programmers say $FAVORITELANGUAGE has strong typing, Ada programmers laugh.
IIRC it's used on the F-22, and an Ada subset is used to program the Space Shuttle.
It does not guarantee bug-free programs, but it tends to move bug discovery forward. I.e., due to the strictness it finds lots of stuff at compile time that in most other languages you wouldn't notice until run time, and finds things at run time that in most other languages you wouldn't notice until you discovered that your application had been sowing garbage among its results for the past three years of deployment.
Regarding the Arianne V, see Babbage's remark to the question he got when he described his machine to the House of Lords.
First off those strict rules help you because you spend miles less time debugging stuff you don't understand As I like to put it, "Ada makes you say what you mean and mean what you say."
That is indeed a stumbling block to most newbies, but if you bite the bullet and go through with it, it soon becomes second nature to think that way. And you find yourself dealing with algorithms and abstractions, because once you've built a component you can forget the details and expect it to work right.
Too bad so many programmers absolutely detest saying what they mean and meaning what they say.
They lied to the interviewees, they attempted to pirate animations used in the movie, after being humiliated during the pre-release screenings they lied to cover it up, they lied to the people who wanted to see screenings -- they're liars. You've obviously gone to great effort to check out the facts. If you propagate a lie does it make you a liar too? Alas for you and Ben, but those are indeed all facts.
ID may be a crock but let these things be debated, not taken for granted. Sure. But what's up for debate that isn't already being debated? And what does this movie contribute to the debate?
It'$ a My$tery to Me, why Ben $tein $hould $hame himself in $uch a $hoddy film. Perhaps he merely had a house payment due, but remember that he's a former Nixon speech writer, so he may be all to happy to support the right wing war on science.
so what underlies an otherwise intelligent religious person to resist evolution?
we need to confront the real underlying psychological issue here: faith in humanity I think it's more a matter of sociology than psychology.
Religions mutate all the time; you aren't likely to find *any* belief that some self-identifying Christian doesn't accept while another rejects it. Religious beliefs seem to be altogether arbitrary, except that religious people usually find or form in-groups that believe the same thing they do, and then start working in the futile effort to get everyone else to conform.
I think the rejection of evolution is just as arbitrary as arguments over the existence and nature of the Trinity or whether people who die as babies get a free pass to Heaven. Someone gets a notion in their head and decides it's a fact of Ultimate Reality.
Many Christians fully accept evolution, while others choke on it. What's the deal? Maybe people just need a bunch of boolean propositions to distinguish their sect from the one that meets two blocks down the street.
Either you have faith in God, and believe in 7 days, or I.D.... or, you have faith that I.D. or Creation is not a possiblity, or can't exist because Science can't prove it. a) You're forgetting a thousand other religious traditions that every bit as much supporting evidence as Gensis or ID (i.e., none whatsoever).
b) You're excluding the middle position that many, perhaps most non-creationists actually hold, namely that science does not and can not say anything at all about the supernatural, and therefore belief in a religious tradition is simply a matter of whether you want to believe something that has no supporting evidence (and, if so, which of the traditions you want to believe).
Perhaps you're unaware that most of the scientists in the USA (a) accept the fact of evolution, and (b) are Christian.
The controversy exists and have never stopped existing since the first time someone brought an idea counter to creationism to the public. There exists controversy. Yes, but there hasn't been any *scientific* controversy for over a century (other than about the details of evolutionary mechanism).
The controversy under discussion is the social controversy created by creationists who don't want their children learning facts that contradict their religious mythology. Their leaders are doing their best to manufacture a scientific controversy to back up their position (or, in the case of ID, to make it *look* like there is one).
... is the closing of minds Then you must really be offended by this movie, since its whole purpose is to keep True Believers from considering evolution on the basis of its evidential merits.
ideas are dangerous to closed minds. Yeah, that's why the backers of this movie tried to keep anyone but creationists from reviewing it before its release.
80 years ago the "establishment" was opposed to teaching the theory of evolution - now the "establishment" doesn't want to discuss the possibility that evolution is "bad" science. You can discuss the possibility all you want. But it's a meaningless discussion unless you bring along some evidence to support the idea that it is.
I also like the fact that the "enlightened pro-evolution" people are usually the ones resorting to argumentum ad hominem... "Usually"?
You wouldn't by chance be able to support that claim, would you? There's no denying that internet discussions are rife with ad hominems from people on all sides of all arguments, but can you honestly say that "evolutionists" are worse about it?
However, I have looked at the "sociology" of the Evolution/Intelligent Design/Creationism debate a fair amount, and what I see disturbs me from all sides. One major concern I have is the elevation of Darwinian natural selection as a means of species creation to an unrealistic importance. I just don't see why it's so important in and of itself. One could certainly be a competent physician, for example, and not believe in Darwinism (or neo-Darwinism). It seems to me that one could even be a quite competent practitioner of any of the biological sciences (other than the various sorts of paleontology) without necessarily agreeing with Darwinism.
Yes, and you could work in a chemistry lab without believing in atomic theory.
However, I wouldn't care to be served by a physician who rejects huge masses of evidence because it conflicted with some religious mythology he happens to believe, whether the topic was biology or chemistry. *Possibly* he can compartmentalize his thoughts well enough that he can still reason about evidence when it comes to medical diagnoses, but why take the chance when you can find a doctor who doesn't have to?
Yet, we are constantly told that a failure to teach Darwinism at the high school level will destroy science education as we know it and result in a US population that is hopelessly ignorant of all science, etc. etc. I just don't buy it.
We could also elect not to teach students about the atomic theory of matter, or indeed, we could neglect teaching science altogether. But you're venturing into the topic of what "education" means, and whether an educated public is a good thing, which are questions entirely different from the (manufactured) controversy about evolution.
But if that's what's up for discussion... how would you feel about some other society that had a policy of teaching school kids a good foundation in every field of science, except for one that conflicted with some powerful group's arbitrary religious beliefs? People here would be laughing their asses off if some Middle Eastern country did that.
On the other hand, we have school systems that literally teach absolutely no information science, computer science, etc. etc., and people graduating from college who literally don't know the different between a byte and a gigabyte. It's hard for me to see why this ONE THING is so vitally important, when it has virtually no practical application and there are scientific topics with enormous practical application that go untaught.
I'm not sure I buy your assumption that kids are being taught more about biology than about computers, but if it is true it might merely be because CS/IT is a relatively new field that doesn't have the "stature" of the traditional sciences. If you take a degree in Literature you'll probably have to have some coursework in the physical sciences, and if you take a degree in CS you'll certainly have to take several semesters of irrelevant calculus, but few degrees make you take any CS at all.
I don't think the problem you perceive has much to do with "Darwinism".
Could the real problem be social or (speak softly now) political? It seems to me that that is exactly the case. The extraordinary efforts put forth by various scientific bodies to defend Darwinism from all criticism strike me as a knee-jerk reaction to a knee-jerk fear that the Scope's trial will happen all over again.
Well, science *is* on the defensive in the USA.
This isn't about science--it's about continuing the Enlightenment project of supplanting all sources of Meaning (capitalization intended) with Scientific Meaning.
Huh?
I've never met *anyone* other than a religious apologist who thought that science was supposed to provide us with Meaning. Science is merely an endeavor to find out how the universe works. Meaning is something you have to construct for yourself.
That doesn't mean that I think that Darwinism is wrong. I actua
If you actually watch the movie or listen to Stein talk about the movie, of course the majority of this group won't, Stein is pointing out that there is no tolerance for dissenting opinions in universities. He's not "pointing it out", because it simply isn't true. Universities are perhaps the most diverse marketplace of ideas on the planet.
In any other context the makers/supporters of Expelled would be arguing that tenure should not exist, because it protects people who want to express radical views.
Stein does not reject Darwinism for the evolution of individual species. He rejects that it is the answer for why life exists and why the universe works that way that it does. Does he actually find anyone who thinks biological evolution answers either of those?
This is just indicative of the paranoid world some wackos live in. Only those that gain their power from deceiving the masses are afraid of open discussion. Presumably you've heard about the extremes the people behind this movie went to to prevent anyone who might give it a negative review from seeing it before the release.
Because I can find lots of stories that make me I am glad the crazies here don't express their religion by bombing people... If you think crazies don't bomb people in the USA, you don't stay very well informed.
Fortunately we don't have a lot of it, but any at all is too much.
Also, who needs bombs when we can take our machine guns out for a shooting spree? Or snipe off random drivers on the freeway?
A lot of *our* crazies don't seem to have any motivation at all.
It is also the filtering of evidence and interpretation of evidence so as to favor one's viewpoint. Quite common in our science today. If you know it's quite common, you shouldn't have any trouble producing a couple of dozen examples for us.
Actually if you watch the film Stein does not necessarily believe in ID. He simple is wondering why so many scientists are so religious about evolution. So... just how many scientists *are* religious about evolution? How many feel differently about evolution than they do about chemistry or galactic rotation?
He is posing questions like, Why do we teach kids the difference between laws, and theory and then act like evolution is a law? Huh? Methinks *you* don't know the difference between a law and a theory.
FYI, evolution is -- if evidence means anything -- a fact. It happened. It still happens.
The theory of evolution is a collection of well supported hypotheses that explain the mechanisms for that fact. (And most of those hypotheses are so well tested that we grant them provisional status as facts themselves. Just as we do in physics or chemistry or any other field of science.)
Evolution is really good at explaining how butterflies change color overtime, it does not explain how you get from paramecium to human Actually it does (modulo your choice of species). You simply don't accept the mountains of evidence.
Notice that that's a reflection on *you*, not a reflection on the fact or theory of evolution.
does that not leave room for some alternate theories? a) Your personal rejection of the evidence has no bearing on the status of the theory of evolution.
b) All fields of science leave room (in principle) for alternative theories. (Cf. Newton and Einstein.) What is lacking here is (b.1) any alternative theory, and (b.2) any need for one (outside the religious scruples of biblical literalists).
Notice that when I say there isn't any alternative theory of evolution, it's with the knowledge that ID's claims do not constitute a theory. They can't even offer a testable hypothesis. Dembski can't even offer an inference algorithm that anyone other than himself can actually apply.
That's not to say that there *couldn't* be an alternative theory. You're welcome to generate one yourself. But given the huge mass of evidence and the lack of need for a new theory, you might as well waste your time coming up with an alternative to atomic theory.
In what way does the presents of evolution rule out an intelligent designer; might that designer have included an evolutionary mechanism? It *doesn't* rule out a designer.
That doesn't give the ID pseudoscience legs though.
All Stein is doing is asking scientists to act like it. No, he's propagandizing for creationists and Republican anti-science apologists.
They should acknowledge the weak spots in any theory and look to finding the explanations. If you had the faintest idea what scientists do, you'd know that that is perhaps what the majority of scientists spend the majority of their time on.
Stein's documentary could have been about a variety of other subjects. He is simply saying don't close the books until all the facts are in. When ID actually brings some facts to the table we'll examine them. However, their "science" to date has been about as dishonest as Stein's propaganda film.
If evolution or non-creationism is correct, and by having a dialogue people are convinced of this fact...then what is the problem? After watching the extended trailer that is the feeling I came away with. Ben's point is that discussion is not being permitted in academia, and in fact the opposite is happening, it is being suppressed. Only if you drink Ben's koolaid.
Behe pontificates on ID from the shelter of his tenured position. His colleages find him an embarassment, but don't have any ability to suppress him.
Gonzalez failed to make tenure, possibly because he spent his time writing a book on religious apologetics rather than doing honest astronomy. At any rate, he *did* neglect his astronomy. The choice was up to him.
The only thing that's lacking in academia is an ID proponent who will support his position with evidence that will pass even the most casual scrutiny.
Do you realize that most US scientists are Christians, and would (presumably) be delighted to find honest evidence that their beliefs are supported by nature? But like (presumably) most Christians, most of them are honest and won't get in line behind a crackpot who uses dishonest rhetoric to "prove" some conclusion they happen agree with.
Dawkins and many others notwithstanding, evolution doesn't disprove god(s) or mandate atheism. Actually it's creationists who think evolution disproves their god. Otherwise they wouldn't be so hysterical about it.
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Not concise in spelling out the details of some low-level module, but very concise for higher-level programming, because it made you be precise when implementing the components.
Once you've worked in an area for several years you end up with a good collection of libraries with clean interfaces, and you find yourself throwing very complex programs together with simple code that "just works", rather than the spaghettied jazzturbation that you usually see when people use other languages.
No reason you can't write clean complex programs in the language of your choice; it's just that Ada won't let you be a slouch. It makes you do the details right, but once you've done that you can forget the details and deal with concepts instead.
Admittedly, I used it at the hobbyist level for several years before I realized how to do that.
Granted, forcing a language on everyone probably wasn't a smart move, even if the language is really good (as some of us think Ada is). But having made that decision, ISTM that they should have stuck to their guns rather than giving in to the whining.
IIRC, the now-familiar GPL'd gnat compiler was one of the earliest Ada compilers, funded at NYU by the military. As others have mentioned, it is now fully integrated into the GNU Compiler Collection (gcc). I don't know how useful it was back in the old days.
We should expect software to work correctly, and take our business elsewhere when it doesn't.
No one dies if your kitchen faucet squirts the water out sideways, but we don't just shrug it off and live with it.
It seems to be popular in France, presumably because the guy who invented it was French. (No, it wasn't designed by a committee. It was selected via a competition for a language to satisfy a rich set of requirements, with special attention to support for embedded programming.)
For those who aren't familiar with it, it's very similar to Pascal, but has a lot more features. Things like multithreading are integral to the language - not a common thing when it came out in '83.
And when other programmers say $FAVORITELANGUAGE has strong typing, Ada programmers laugh.
IIRC it's used on the F-22, and an Ada subset is used to program the Space Shuttle.
It does not guarantee bug-free programs, but it tends to move bug discovery forward. I.e., due to the strictness it finds lots of stuff at compile time that in most other languages you wouldn't notice until run time, and finds things at run time that in most other languages you wouldn't notice until you discovered that your application had been sowing garbage among its results for the past three years of deployment.
Regarding the Arianne V, see Babbage's remark to the question he got when he described his machine to the House of Lords.
That is indeed a stumbling block to most newbies, but if you bite the bullet and go through with it, it soon becomes second nature to think that way. And you find yourself dealing with algorithms and abstractions, because once you've built a component you can forget the details and expect it to work right.
Too bad so many programmers absolutely detest saying what they mean and meaning what they say.
"You're welcome to let us use your commercial game for free."
What does it even mean to say you "disagree" with a license? Is it newsworthy if someone "disagrees" with Microsoft's licensing?
Nothing to see here, folks.
Let's give rich people the right of way at intersections and higher speed limits on the highways while we're at it.
we need to confront the real underlying psychological issue here: faith in humanity I think it's more a matter of sociology than psychology.
Religions mutate all the time; you aren't likely to find *any* belief that some self-identifying Christian doesn't accept while another rejects it. Religious beliefs seem to be altogether arbitrary, except that religious people usually find or form in-groups that believe the same thing they do, and then start working in the futile effort to get everyone else to conform.
I think the rejection of evolution is just as arbitrary as arguments over the existence and nature of the Trinity or whether people who die as babies get a free pass to Heaven. Someone gets a notion in their head and decides it's a fact of Ultimate Reality.
Many Christians fully accept evolution, while others choke on it. What's the deal? Maybe people just need a bunch of boolean propositions to distinguish their sect from the one that meets two blocks down the street.
b) You're excluding the middle position that many, perhaps most non-creationists actually hold, namely that science does not and can not say anything at all about the supernatural, and therefore belief in a religious tradition is simply a matter of whether you want to believe something that has no supporting evidence (and, if so, which of the traditions you want to believe).
Perhaps you're unaware that most of the scientists in the USA (a) accept the fact of evolution, and (b) are Christian.
The controversy under discussion is the social controversy created by creationists who don't want their children learning facts that contradict their religious mythology. Their leaders are doing their best to manufacture a scientific controversy to back up their position (or, in the case of ID, to make it *look* like there is one).
... is the closing of minds Then you must really be offended by this movie, since its whole purpose is to keep True Believers from considering evolution on the basis of its evidential merits. ideas are dangerous to closed minds. Yeah, that's why the backers of this movie tried to keep anyone but creationists from reviewing it before its release. 80 years ago the "establishment" was opposed to teaching the theory of evolution - now the "establishment" doesn't want to discuss the possibility that evolution is "bad" science. You can discuss the possibility all you want. But it's a meaningless discussion unless you bring along some evidence to support the idea that it is. I also like the fact that the "enlightened pro-evolution" people are usually the ones resorting to argumentum ad hominem... "Usually"?You wouldn't by chance be able to support that claim, would you? There's no denying that internet discussions are rife with ad hominems from people on all sides of all arguments, but can you honestly say that "evolutionists" are worse about it?
However, I have looked at the "sociology" of the Evolution/Intelligent Design/Creationism debate a fair amount, and what I see disturbs me from all sides. One major concern I have is the elevation of Darwinian natural selection as a means of species creation to an unrealistic importance. I just don't see why it's so important in and of itself. One could certainly be a competent physician, for example, and not believe in Darwinism (or neo-Darwinism). It seems to me that one could even be a quite competent practitioner of any of the biological sciences (other than the various sorts of paleontology) without necessarily agreeing with Darwinism.
Yes, and you could work in a chemistry lab without believing in atomic theory.
However, I wouldn't care to be served by a physician who rejects huge masses of evidence because it conflicted with some religious mythology he happens to believe, whether the topic was biology or chemistry. *Possibly* he can compartmentalize his thoughts well enough that he can still reason about evidence when it comes to medical diagnoses, but why take the chance when you can find a doctor who doesn't have to?
Yet, we are constantly told that a failure to teach Darwinism at the high school level will destroy science education as we know it and result in a US population that is hopelessly ignorant of all science, etc. etc. I just don't buy it.
We could also elect not to teach students about the atomic theory of matter, or indeed, we could neglect teaching science altogether. But you're venturing into the topic of what "education" means, and whether an educated public is a good thing, which are questions entirely different from the (manufactured) controversy about evolution.
But if that's what's up for discussion... how would you feel about some other society that had a policy of teaching school kids a good foundation in every field of science, except for one that conflicted with some powerful group's arbitrary religious beliefs? People here would be laughing their asses off if some Middle Eastern country did that.
On the other hand, we have school systems that literally teach absolutely no information science, computer science, etc. etc., and people graduating from college who literally don't know the different between a byte and a gigabyte. It's hard for me to see why this ONE THING is so vitally important, when it has virtually no practical application and there are scientific topics with enormous practical application that go untaught.
I'm not sure I buy your assumption that kids are being taught more about biology than about computers, but if it is true it might merely be because CS/IT is a relatively new field that doesn't have the "stature" of the traditional sciences. If you take a degree in Literature you'll probably have to have some coursework in the physical sciences, and if you take a degree in CS you'll certainly have to take several semesters of irrelevant calculus, but few degrees make you take any CS at all.
I don't think the problem you perceive has much to do with "Darwinism".
Could the real problem be social or (speak softly now) political? It seems to me that that is exactly the case. The extraordinary efforts put forth by various scientific bodies to defend Darwinism from all criticism strike me as a knee-jerk reaction to a knee-jerk fear that the Scope's trial will happen all over again.
Well, science *is* on the defensive in the USA.
This isn't about science--it's about continuing the Enlightenment project of supplanting all sources of Meaning (capitalization intended) with Scientific Meaning.
Huh?
I've never met *anyone* other than a religious apologist who thought that science was supposed to provide us with Meaning. Science is merely an endeavor to find out how the universe works. Meaning is something you have to construct for yourself.
That doesn't mean that I think that Darwinism is wrong. I actua
In any other context the makers/supporters of Expelled would be arguing that tenure should not exist, because it protects people who want to express radical views. Stein does not reject Darwinism for the evolution of individual species. He rejects that it is the answer for why life exists and why the universe works that way that it does. Does he actually find anyone who thinks biological evolution answers either of those?
The irony (and hypocrisy) is astonishing.
Fortunately we don't have a lot of it, but any at all is too much.
Also, who needs bombs when we can take our machine guns out for a shooting spree? Or snipe off random drivers on the freeway?
A lot of *our* crazies don't seem to have any motivation at all.
FYI, evolution is -- if evidence means anything -- a fact. It happened. It still happens.
The theory of evolution is a collection of well supported hypotheses that explain the mechanisms for that fact. (And most of those hypotheses are so well tested that we grant them provisional status as facts themselves. Just as we do in physics or chemistry or any other field of science.) Evolution is really good at explaining how butterflies change color overtime, it does not explain how you get from paramecium to human Actually it does (modulo your choice of species). You simply don't accept the mountains of evidence.
Notice that that's a reflection on *you*, not a reflection on the fact or theory of evolution. does that not leave room for some alternate theories? a) Your personal rejection of the evidence has no bearing on the status of the theory of evolution.
b) All fields of science leave room (in principle) for alternative theories. (Cf. Newton and Einstein.) What is lacking here is (b.1) any alternative theory, and (b.2) any need for one (outside the religious scruples of biblical literalists).
Notice that when I say there isn't any alternative theory of evolution, it's with the knowledge that ID's claims do not constitute a theory. They can't even offer a testable hypothesis. Dembski can't even offer an inference algorithm that anyone other than himself can actually apply.
That's not to say that there *couldn't* be an alternative theory. You're welcome to generate one yourself. But given the huge mass of evidence and the lack of need for a new theory, you might as well waste your time coming up with an alternative to atomic theory. In what way does the presents of evolution rule out an intelligent designer; might that designer have included an evolutionary mechanism? It *doesn't* rule out a designer.
That doesn't give the ID pseudoscience legs though. All Stein is doing is asking scientists to act like it. No, he's propagandizing for creationists and Republican anti-science apologists. They should acknowledge the weak spots in any theory and look to finding the explanations. If you had the faintest idea what scientists do, you'd know that that is perhaps what the majority of scientists spend the majority of their time on. Stein's documentary could have been about a variety of other subjects. He is simply saying don't close the books until all the facts are in. When ID actually brings some facts to the table we'll examine them. However, their "science" to date has been about as dishonest as Stein's propaganda film.
Behe pontificates on ID from the shelter of his tenured position. His colleages find him an embarassment, but don't have any ability to suppress him.
Gonzalez failed to make tenure, possibly because he spent his time writing a book on religious apologetics rather than doing honest astronomy. At any rate, he *did* neglect his astronomy. The choice was up to him.
The only thing that's lacking in academia is an ID proponent who will support his position with evidence that will pass even the most casual scrutiny.
Do you realize that most US scientists are Christians, and would (presumably) be delighted to find honest evidence that their beliefs are supported by nature? But like (presumably) most Christians, most of them are honest and won't get in line behind a crackpot who uses dishonest rhetoric to "prove" some conclusion they happen agree with.