Turing tar-pit
n. 1. A place where anything is possible but
nothing of interest is practical. Alan Turing helped lay the
foundations of computer science by showing that all machines and
languages capable of expressing a certain very primitive set of
operations are logically equivalent in the kinds of computations
they can carry out, and in principle have capabilities that differ
only in speed from those of the most powerful and
elegantly-designed computers. However, no machine or language
exactly matching Turing's primitive set has ever been built (other
than possibly as a classroom exercise), because it would be
horribly slow and far too painful to use. A `Turing tar-pit' is
any computer language or other tool which shares this property.
That is, it's theoretically universal --- but in practice, the
harder you struggle to get any real work done, the deeper its
inadequacies suck you in. Compare {bondage-and-discipline
language}. 2. The perennial
holy wars over whether language A
or B is the "most powerful".
