Alright, I'll give it a shot. A couple of definitions will be helpful here: A turing machine is a theoretical device invented by Alan Turing. It consists of a

Alright, I'll give it a shot. A couple of definitions will be helpful here: A turing machine is a theoretical device invented by Alan Turing. It consists of a tape (data) and a fixed table of rules (the program). The machine has a head which reads or writes one piece of data at a time. The logic in the table tells the head what to do next (move, read, write etc). That's great, but it only gives you one (fixed) program at a time. So what if you encode the program and the data on the tape, and set up your table of rules such that it can execute any program. Then you have what's called a Universal Turing Machine. That idea is basically the theory behind iterative programming languages. The equivalent theory for functional programming languages is the Alonzo Church's lambda calculus. The two worked together to create the Church-Turing thesis, which states that anything computable can be computed by a turing machine (or expressed using lambda calculus). So you can essentially translate "Turing complete" as meaning "able to compute anything". Since there is nothing that can compute more than a Turing machine, that means all Turing-complete languages are equivalent. (Well, the Church-Turing thesis isn't actually provable, since "computable" is a bit hand-wavy, but it's generally considered to be true). A non-rigourous litmus test is that something is turing complete if it has conditions, looping and memory access, or recursive functions. You can also prove something is Turing-complete by using it to write an interpreter for a Turing-complete language. Examples of things that aren't turing complete: regular expressions, (standard) SQL, markup languages (HTML, XML, etc), some templating languages. Interesting things that are turing complete: basically every iterative or functional programming language, Conway's Game of Life, Minecraft.