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Turing tarpit

noun

Etymology

Coined by Alan Perlis (1922-1990), computer scientist, from the name of Alan Turing (1912-1954), who described a basis for all possible computational algorithms, and tarpit.

Definitions

  1. The situation in which a programming language is only minimally Turing complete, so that…

    The situation in which a programming language is only minimally Turing complete, so that "everything is possible but nothing is easy".

    • The basic reason for increasing the size of the language is the so-called Turing tarpit: if the language is too simple, one may be able to do anything in it.
    • Without more abstract notions of what constitutes important aspects of a programming language, one is seriously in danger of falling into the Turing Tarpit.

  2. Alternative form of Turing tarpit.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for Turing tarpit. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA