the perfect is the enemy of the good; It's more important to have something running now and to iterate on that, than to have something that will work better if we can get it to run at all. Only if it proves that it's too slow should you worry about optimizing. And at least then you can look at it run, find the bottle neck and fix that, instead of wasting your time, from the beginning, in a much more difficult, but faster language.

Exactly, my engineering degree was essential in pulling me away out of religion (and my parents are missionaries...). I prefer tooth-fairy agnosticism: Yes, there could be a tooth fairy (or god) I I haven't seen, but so far so much points towards 'no', and nothing really points towards 'yes' that it's only reasonable to act as if it doesn't exist. The limit of agnosticism as everything points to the null hypothesis is atheism.

I got my job (in avionics software) partly because of my score on the test my boss gives. Now I correct them for him, and it's hilarious, because there are a lot of people out there who can talk big but are good for nothing.

http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/ 25/1311231&from=rss>

This entire conversation sounds like demonstration of of that recent article...

but this case isn't like politics where there's no right answer...
Sure the scientific side has some emotional attachment to it, but there's a lot more than that on their side.

It's all cognitive dissodance -> unfortunatly for people who've spent their entire lives believing something it's easier to ignore facts then to change your world view. Especially since one of the major reasons that religions do so well is that sometimes a belief, wether or not it's true, can be benificial to the host. So you're not just asking them to go against a life-long world view, but one that has been benificial to it's host.

luckily for me my early interest in this topic (creationism vs. evolution) lead me to the facts before that threshold was reached, which would have locked me into a lifetime of religious nonsense... (I come from one of those religious-fundamentalist communities/falilies)

"give me your children until they are 12 and they will be mine forever"

generational replacement, the older generation is basically lost.
which is why it's so important that things like ID don't get into schools and cause the same kind of non-recoverable errors the next generation.