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Beware of the Turing tar-pit (2004)


…in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy. What is the Turing tar-pit? It’s the place where a program has become so powerful, so general, that the effort to configure it to solve a specific problem matches or exceeds the effort to start over and write a program that solves the specific problem.

I become frustrated with the obvious deficiencies of the tools, and before I know it I’m sketching out ideas for platforms, frameworks, and architectures to solve a whole class of similar problems. Tools that solve whole classes of problems in generic ways offer the potential for vast improvements is productivity. Out of self defence, I’ve developed some heuristics for exploring the edges of the tar-pit and mining generalization for insights:

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