The Layperson's Guide to Programming Languages


C: You shoot yourself in the foot.

C++: You accidentally create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot
them all in the foot. Providing emergancy assistance is impossible
since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just
pointing at others and saying, "That's me, over there."

SH, CSH, ETC.:  You can't remember the syntax for anything, so you
spend five hours reading man pages before giving up.  You then shoot
the computer and switch to C.

FORTRAN: You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run
out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out
of bullets, you continue anyway because you have no exception-handling
ability.

LISP: You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with
which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with
which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with
which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds ...

PROLOG:  You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot, but the bullet,
failing to find its mark, backtracks into the gun which then explodes
in your face.

SMALLTALK: You spend so much time playing with the graphics and
windowing system that your boss shoots you in the foot, takes away
your workstation, and makes you develop in COBOL on a character
terminal.

FORTH: Foot in yourself shoot.

ASSEMBLY: You crash the OS and overwrite the root disk.  The system
administrator arrives and shoots you in the foot.  After a moment of
contemplation, the administrator shoots himself in the foot and then
hops around the room rabidly shooting at everyone in sight.

PASCAL: The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot, no
matter how you try.

XBASE: Shooting yourself is no problem. If you want to shoot yourself
in the foot, you'll have to use Clipper.

CLIPPER: You grab a bullet, get ready to insert it in the gun so that
you can shoot yourself in the foot, and discover that the gun that the
bullet fits has not yet been built, but should be arriving in the mail
REAL SOON NOW.

DBASE: You squeeze the trigger, but the bullet moves so slowly that by
the time your foot feels the pain you've forgotten why you shot
yourself anyway.

DBASE IV VERSION 1.0: You pull the trigger, but it turns out that the
gun was a poorly-designed grenade and the whole building blows up.

VISUAL BASIC: You'll shoot yourself in the foot, but you'll have so
much fun doing it that you don't care.

APL: You hear a gunshot, and there's a hole in your foot, but you
don't remember enough linear algebra to understand what the hell
happened.

MODULA/2: You can't shoot yourself in the foot because again you have
forgotten which module it was you'd have to import the gun from.

ADA: If you are dumb enough to actually use this language, the United
States Department of Defense will kidnap you, stand you up in front of
a firing squad, and tell the soldiers, "Shoot at his feet."

COBOL: After you've written three pages of natural English stating
with which gun and bullet, at what angle and speed you want to shoot
whom in which foot, you discover that the syntax also requires a
statement of why you want to do so, making you give up because
meanwhile you've forgotten what exactly the reason was.

JAVA:  You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot using a bullet that
will work in any gun in the world.  But you discover that the
"Microsoft Gun" is actually a cross bow.

PHP: Shooting Apaches in the foot has never before been so much fun.

SQL: You cut your foot off, send it out to a service bureau and when
it returns, it has a hole in it, but will no longer fit the attachment
at the end of your leg.

CENTURA TEAM DEVELOPER: Shooting yourself is no problem.  Hell,
shooting yourself in the foot isn't a problem either.  Coming up with
SQL statements that will perform the task regardless of SQL server
software, time, health, and humidity, and still hit the same person's
foot each time, is the problem.

GUPTA SQL WINDOWS 3.0: Shoot yourself in the head.