Programming Languages
for
Shooting Yourself in the Foot

(author unknown)

C

You shoot yourself in the foot.

Algol

You shoot yourself in the foot with a musket. The musket is esthetically fascinating, and the wound baffles the adolescent medic in the emergency room.

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-processing ability.

COBOL

USEing a COLT45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place ARM.HAND.FINGER on HANDGUN.TRIGGER, and SQUEEZE. THEN return HANDGUN to HOLSTER. Check whether shoelace needs to be retied.

BASIC

Shoot self in foot with water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.

PL/I

You consume all available system resources, including all the offline bullets. The Data Processing & Payroll Department doubles its size, triples its budget, acquires four new mainframes, and drops the original one on your foot.

SNOBOL

You grab your foot with your hand, then rewrite your hand to be a bullet. The act of shooting the original foot then changes your hand/bullet into yet another foot (a left foot).

SNOBOL (again)

If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot. If you fail, shoot yourself in the right foot.

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 . . .

scheme

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 . . . but none of the other appendages are aware of this happening.

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.

C++

You accidently create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical care 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."

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."

Modula/2

After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in the language, you shoot yourself in the head.

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.

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.

APL

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

APL (again)

You shoot yourself in the foot, then spend all day figuring out how to do it in fewer characters.

FORTH

Foot in yourself shoot.

Pascal

The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot.

Concurrent Euclid

You shoot yourself in somebody else's foot.

HyperTalk

Put the first bullet of the gun into foot left of leg you. Answer the result.

Motif

You spend days writing a UIL description of your foot, the trajectory, the bullet, and the intricate scrollwork on the ivory handles of the gun. When you finally get around to pulling the trigger, the gun jams.

Unix

% ls
foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o
% rm * .o
rm: .o: No such file or directory
% ls
%

Xbase

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

Paradox

Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your users can too.

Revelation

You'll be able too shoot yourself in the foot just as soon as you figure out what all these bullets are for.

Visual Basic

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

Prolog

You tell your program that you want to be shot in the foot; the program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn't explain.

370 JCL

You send your foot down to MIS with a 400-page document explaining how you want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot comes back deep-fried.