Turing tar-pit

A place where anything is possible but nothing of interest is

practical. Alan M. 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 that

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.

A tar pit is a geological occurence where subterranean tar

leaks to the surface, creating a large puddle (or pit) of tar.

Animals wandering or falling in get stuck, being unable to

extricate themselves from the tar. La Brea, California, has a

museum built around the fossilized remains of mammals and

birds found in such a tar pit.

[Jargon File]

(1998-06-27)