like nailing jelly to a tree

<jargon, humour>

Used to describe a task thought to be impossible, especially one in which the difficulty arises from poor specification or inherent slipperiness in the problem domain. "Trying to display the "prettiest" arrangement of nodes and arcs that diagrams a given graph is like nailing jelly to a tree, because nobody's sure what "prettiest" means algorithmically."

[Jargon File]

Last updated: 1997-12-23

Nearby terms:

like kicking dead whales down the beach ♦ like nailing jelly to a tree ♦ like this

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