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".