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 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. 2. The perennial holy wars
over whether language A or B is the "most powerful".
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