The story
Coined by Alan Perlis (1922-1990), computer scientist, from the name of Alan Turing (1912-1954), who described a basis for all possible computational algorithms, and tarpit.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Turing tarpit
Today it means: The situation in which a programming language is only minimally Turing complete, so that "everything is possible but nothing is easy". Full definition →