like kicking dead whales down the beach

kicking dead whales down the beach

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

like this

You weren't supposed to follow that link, it was just an example of what a link looks like.

Nearby terms:

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

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