1. [common] Said of a computer system with
excessive or annoying security barriers, usage limits, or access
policies. The implication is that said policies are preventing
hackers from getting interesting work done. The variant
`fascistic' seems to have been preferred at MIT, poss. by analogy
with `touristic' (see tourist or under the influence of
German/Yiddish `faschistisch'). 2. In the design of languages
and other software tools, `the fascist alternative' is the most
restrictive and structured way of capturing a particular function;
the implication is that this may be desirable in order to simplify
the implementation or provide tighter error checking. Compare
bondage-and-discipline language, although that term is global
rather than local.
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....
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....
