Talk:Turing tarpit

No longer a stub

G'day,

I removed the stub tag {{compu-prog-stub}} because this article seemed quite sufficient and informative for such a specific topic. I'm a layperson (a pharmacist -- no mathematician!) and I think it's important to remember that all of Wikipedia should be accessible to the layperson. If there's more important info then please add it (editors) but this seems complete as is. ben 17:51, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Good call. A lot of articles labeled as stubs shouldn't be, and this was a clear-cut case. —Keenan Pepper 18:32, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Haskell

Why is Haskell included in "see also" If there is some reason for it to be here it should be specified in the article. Haskell neither strikes me as a Turing Tarpit nor the opposite. 174.7.99.85 (talk) 03:22, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

proposed Esoteric programming language merge

This doesn't seem desirable. A Turing tarpit is only one type of esoteric language, and shouldn't be shoehorned into the general article. -R. S. Shaw 03:50, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Tarpit or tar pit

Move the article or change the lead. Bye, Shinobu 06:05, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Document or delete

How do we know that this is what the epigram means?? How do we know it's popular enough to warrant mention in a general encyclopaedia? Can we find actual uses of the term?

I keep returning to this article in the hope of finding answers to these questions, but they're not here. I think it's best to supply them or make this article a reference to the epigrams article (if that should be in here). Rp (talk) 15:41, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

Richard Lipton gives a very different interpretation of Perlis' quote:^[1]

Perlis was famous for many “sayings”. He talked about “one man’s constant is another’s variable,” he coined the term “Turing Tar-pit”. The latter referred, of course, to the fact that just about anything interesting that one wanted to do with computers was undecidable.

—Ruud 15:38, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

Nine years have passed and the article is no better than it was back then really. 77.61.180.106 (talk) 17:03, 14 September 2021 (UTC)

Symfony

I would like to propose the PHP framework Symfony as a great example of a Turing tarpit. How do I go about creating a case for this? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.237.62.254 (talk) 16:06, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

What does "common tasks" mean

It would be nice to see that link somewhere useful. 96.236.201.154 (talk) 02:33, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

Like printing "hello world". Or reading two numbers from input and printing their sum. Try either in Brainfuck and you will understand. -- DevSolar2 (talk) 13:33, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

Translation problem : did Alan Perlis select "Turing tarpit" as a rhyme of "Turing complete" ?

I'm in trouble translating this article to Japanese Wikipedia.

I first saw this topic at Japanese Wikipedia, translated as "Turing's quagmire". I doubted why "quagmire" and checked English one. So I want reliable references explaining why Alan Perlis select "- tarpit", not "flaw" nor "trap" nor "quagmire" nor so on.

What I believe currently is he selected "- tarpit" as a rhyme of "- complete" and gave it a double meaning. So I think if we can't keep the rhyme at translation, we should unveil this double meaning to "tarpit of Turing completeness" or such.

By the way, In Japanese, the difference of pronunciation between translated "tarpit" and "complete" is so large that the literal translation breaks this rhyme completely. But, instead "tarpit", the Japanese translation of "pitfall" has near pronunciation of "complete". I believe if Alan Perlis were trying to translate this article, he would choose "Turing pitfall" for Japanese to keep the rhyme of "Turing complete". --Abo Junghichi (talk) 13:48, 30 May 2019 (UTC)

I don't think English speakers sense any rhyme there. The i in pit is short and lower than the e in -plete, so the two don't rhyme. Besides, the stress in tar pit and complete is on a different syllable. I think Perlis was simply referring to a tar pit as being an environment in which everything you do takes an enormous amount of effort, which is not quite what is meant by a quagmire, in English at least. Can't you translate it literally? Rp (talk) 15:39, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

In Japanese region, the word "tar-pit" is as uncommon as words from science fiction. I don't know whether it and UFO exists or not in Japan. Thus, I think Japanese hardly see another meaning from it with literal translation. But, if this situation applies at English region too, it is exactly what Perlis intended. No matter whether English or Japanese or ..., any intelligentsia can see what literal "tar-pit" imply. What I'm afraid is, "tar-pit" is not such a difficult word for English people, especially people in the U.S. where the most famous tar-pit exists and Perlis was. If not, I think I should not translate it such a difficult word. Abo Junghichi (talk) 17:00, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

Late to the party. The above is pedantic, off target for the purpose of the translation, the succinct answer to “is it a rhyme?” is “no”, because here tar pit is a colloquialism:

• Euphemism for a situation, a sticky messy quagmire, easy for any, many, to enter, so difficult to deal with, and few, if any, escape from or cope
• La Brea Tar Pits versus prey and predators
• Kobayashi Maru versus events, leaders and would-be organizers

QED WurmWoode^T 21:53, 29 January 2024 (UTC)