18 lines
1014 B
Plaintext
18 lines
1014 B
Plaintext
Turing tar-pit
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n. 1. A place where anything is possible but nothing of interest is
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practical. Alan Turing helped lay the foundations of computer science by
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showing that all machines and languages capable of expressing a certain very
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primitive set of operations are logically equivalent in the kinds of
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computations they can carry out, and in principle have capabilities that
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differ only in speed from those of the most powerful and elegantly designed
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computers. However, no machine or language exactly matching Turing's
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primitive set has ever been built (other than possibly as a classroom
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exercise), because it would be horribly slow and far too painful to use. A
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Turing tar-pit is any computer language or other tool that shares this
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property. That is, it's theoretically universal but in practice, the harder
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you struggle to get any real work done, the deeper its inadequacies suck you
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in. Compare bondage-and-discipline language. 2. The perennial holy wars over
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whether language A or B is the most powerful.
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