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Shooting Yourself in the Foot
or
How to Determine Which Programming Language You're Using
This is based on the much-quoted principle that in C
it's fairly easy to "shoot yourself in the foot" (metaphorically speaking), whereas in C++ it's harder to shoot yourself
in the foot, but when you do, you usually blow your whole leg off.
The proliferation of modern programming languages which seem to have stolen countless features from each other sometimes
makes it difficult to remember which language you're using. This guide is offered as a public service to help programmers in
such dilemmas.
C:
You shoot yourself in the foot.
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."
Objective C:
You write a protocol for shooting yourself in the foot so that all people can get shot in their feet.
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."
-- or --
After correctly packaging your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream and shoot
yourself in the foot. When you try, however, you discover that your foot is of the wrong type.
Algol (60 or 68):
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.
Algol 60:
You spend hours trying to figure out how to fire the gun since it doesn't have any provision for input or output.
Algol 68:
You mildly deprocedure the gun, the bullet gets firmly dereferenced, and your foot is strongly coerced to void.
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.
-- or --
You shoot yourself in the foot, then spend all day figuring out how to do it fewer characters.
Assembly language:
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.
-- or --
You try to shoot yourself in the foot only to discover you must first reinvent the gun, the bullet, and your foot.
Basic:
Shoot self in foot with water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.
Visual Basic:
You'll shoot yourself in the foot, but you'll have so much fun doing it that you won't care.
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.
-- or --
You try to shoot yourself in the foot, but the gun won't fire unless it's aligned in column 8.
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.
Eiffel:
You take out a contract on your foot. The precondition is that there's a bullet in the gun, the postcondition is that there's
a hole in your foot.
Forth:
You yourself foot in shoot.
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.
Java:
You shoot yourself in the foot. Everyone else who accesses your website leaves hobbling and cursing.
Lisp:
You try to shoot yourself in the foot, but the gun jams on a stray parenthesis.
-- or --
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.
Pascal:
The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot.
Modula-2:
After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in the language, you shoot yourself in the head.
Perl:
You shoot yourself in the foot. You then decide it was so much fun that you invent another six completely different ways
to do it.
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.
-- or --
Since the bullet is a different type from your foot, the bullet automatically gets converted to another foot on arrival. It's
still difficult to walk afterwards.
Prolog:
You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot, but the bullet, failing to find its mark, backtracks to the gun which then
explodes in your face.
-- or --
You tell your program you want to be shot in the foot. The program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn't
allow it to explain.
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.
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.
-- or --
You shoot yourself in the foot, and your foot sends "doesNotUnderstand: Pain" to your brain.
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).
-- or --
If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot. If you fail, shoot yourself in the right foot.
Paradox:
Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your users can too.
Revelation:
You'll be able to shoot yourself in the foot just as soon as you figure out what all these bullets are for.
English:
You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off.
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.
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.
370 JCL:
You send your foot down to MIS with a 4000-page document explaining how you want it to be shot. Three years later,
your foot comes back deep-fried.
Unix:
% ls
foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o
% rm * .o
rm: .o: No such file or directory
% ls
%
Concurrent Euclid:
You shoot yourself in somebody else's foot.
HyperTalk:
Put the first bullet of the gun into foot left of leg of 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.
or
How to Determine Which Programming Language You're Using
This is based on the much-quoted principle that in C
it's fairly easy to "shoot yourself in the foot" (metaphorically speaking), whereas in C++ it's harder to shoot yourself
in the foot, but when you do, you usually blow your whole leg off.
The proliferation of modern programming languages which seem to have stolen countless features from each other sometimes
makes it difficult to remember which language you're using. This guide is offered as a public service to help programmers in
such dilemmas.
C:
You shoot yourself in the foot.
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."
Objective C:
You write a protocol for shooting yourself in the foot so that all people can get shot in their feet.
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."
-- or --
After correctly packaging your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream and shoot
yourself in the foot. When you try, however, you discover that your foot is of the wrong type.
Algol (60 or 68):
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.
Algol 60:
You spend hours trying to figure out how to fire the gun since it doesn't have any provision for input or output.
Algol 68:
You mildly deprocedure the gun, the bullet gets firmly dereferenced, and your foot is strongly coerced to void.
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.
-- or --
You shoot yourself in the foot, then spend all day figuring out how to do it fewer characters.
Assembly language:
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.
-- or --
You try to shoot yourself in the foot only to discover you must first reinvent the gun, the bullet, and your foot.
Basic:
Shoot self in foot with water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.
Visual Basic:
You'll shoot yourself in the foot, but you'll have so much fun doing it that you won't care.
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.
-- or --
You try to shoot yourself in the foot, but the gun won't fire unless it's aligned in column 8.
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.
Eiffel:
You take out a contract on your foot. The precondition is that there's a bullet in the gun, the postcondition is that there's
a hole in your foot.
Forth:
You yourself foot in shoot.
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.
Java:
You shoot yourself in the foot. Everyone else who accesses your website leaves hobbling and cursing.
Lisp:
You try to shoot yourself in the foot, but the gun jams on a stray parenthesis.
-- or --
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.
Pascal:
The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot.
Modula-2:
After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in the language, you shoot yourself in the head.
Perl:
You shoot yourself in the foot. You then decide it was so much fun that you invent another six completely different ways
to do it.
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.
-- or --
Since the bullet is a different type from your foot, the bullet automatically gets converted to another foot on arrival. It's
still difficult to walk afterwards.
Prolog:
You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot, but the bullet, failing to find its mark, backtracks to the gun which then
explodes in your face.
-- or --
You tell your program you want to be shot in the foot. The program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn't
allow it to explain.
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.
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.
-- or --
You shoot yourself in the foot, and your foot sends "doesNotUnderstand: Pain" to your brain.
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).
-- or --
If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot. If you fail, shoot yourself in the right foot.
Paradox:
Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your users can too.
Revelation:
You'll be able to shoot yourself in the foot just as soon as you figure out what all these bullets are for.
English:
You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off.
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.
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.
370 JCL:
You send your foot down to MIS with a 4000-page document explaining how you want it to be shot. Three years later,
your foot comes back deep-fried.
Unix:
% ls
foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o
% rm * .o
rm: .o: No such file or directory
% ls
%
Concurrent Euclid:
You shoot yourself in somebody else's foot.
HyperTalk:
Put the first bullet of the gun into foot left of leg of 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.
Amazingly I think I may have got that wrong, which in Smalltalk is almost impossible.
Notorious Biggles wrote:
> 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.
And it's so easy to shoot yourself in the foot - foot shoot ^blood - that doing so in any other language becomes depressing drudge work.
> 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.
And it's so easy to shoot yourself in the foot - foot shoot ^blood - that doing so in any other language becomes depressing drudge work.
There's no PHP!
But otherwise quite good :-)
But otherwise quite good :-)
Yes, but not recently.
Dear God, have you gone mad?
Shooting Yourself in the Foot
or
How to Determine Which Programming Language You're Using
This is based on the much-quoted principle that in C
it's fairly easy to "shoot yourself in the foot" (metaphorically speaking), whereas in C++ it's harder to shoot yourself
in the foot, but when you do, you usually blow your whole leg off.
The proliferation of modern programming languages which seem to have stolen countless features from each other sometimes
makes it difficult to remember which language you're using. This guide is offered as a public service to help programmers in
such dilemmas.
C:
You shoot yourself in the foot.
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."
Objective C:
You write a protocol for shooting yourself in the foot so that all people can get shot in their feet.
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."
-- or --
After correctly packaging your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream and shoot
yourself in the foot. When you try, however, you discover that your foot is of the wrong type.
Algol (60 or 68):
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.
Algol 60:
You spend hours trying to figure out how to fire the gun since it doesn't have any provision for input or output.
Algol 68:
You mildly deprocedure the gun, the bullet gets firmly dereferenced, and your foot is strongly coerced to void.
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.
-- or --
You shoot yourself in the foot, then spend all day figuring out how to do it fewer characters.
Assembly language:
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.
-- or --
You try to shoot yourself in the foot only to discover you must first reinvent the gun, the bullet, and your foot.
Basic:
Shoot self in foot with water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.
Visual Basic:
You'll shoot yourself in the foot, but you'll have so much fun doing it that you won't care.
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.
-- or --
You try to shoot yourself in the foot, but the gun won't fire unless it's aligned in column 8.
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.
Eiffel:
You take out a contract on your foot. The precondition is that there's a bullet in the gun, the postcondition is that there's
a hole in your foot.
Forth:
You yourself foot in shoot.
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.
Java:
You shoot yourself in the foot. Everyone else who accesses your website leaves hobbling and cursing.
Lisp:
You try to shoot yourself in the foot, but the gun jams on a stray parenthesis.
-- or --
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.
Pascal:
The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot.
Modula-2:
After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in the language, you shoot yourself in the head.
Perl:
You shoot yourself in the foot. You then decide it was so much fun that you invent another six completely different ways
to do it.
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.
-- or --
Since the bullet is a different type from your foot, the bullet automatically gets converted to another foot on arrival. It's
still difficult to walk afterwards.
Prolog:
You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot, but the bullet, failing to find its mark, backtracks to the gun which then
explodes in your face.
-- or --
You tell your program you want to be shot in the foot. The program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn't
allow it to explain.
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.
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.
-- or --
You shoot yourself in the foot, and your foot sends "doesNotUnderstand: Pain" to your brain.
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).
-- or --
If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot. If you fail, shoot yourself in the right foot.
Paradox:
Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your users can too.
Revelation:
You'll be able to shoot yourself in the foot just as soon as you figure out what all these bullets are for.
English:
You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off.
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.
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.
370 JCL:
You send your foot down to MIS with a 4000-page document explaining how you want it to be shot. Three years later,
your foot comes back deep-fried.
Unix:
% ls
foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o
% rm * .o
rm: .o: No such file or directory
% ls
%
Concurrent Euclid:
You shoot yourself in somebody else's foot.
HyperTalk:
Put the first bullet of the gun into foot left of leg of 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.
or
How to Determine Which Programming Language You're Using
This is based on the much-quoted principle that in C
it's fairly easy to "shoot yourself in the foot" (metaphorically speaking), whereas in C++ it's harder to shoot yourself
in the foot, but when you do, you usually blow your whole leg off.
The proliferation of modern programming languages which seem to have stolen countless features from each other sometimes
makes it difficult to remember which language you're using. This guide is offered as a public service to help programmers in
such dilemmas.
C:
You shoot yourself in the foot.
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."
Objective C:
You write a protocol for shooting yourself in the foot so that all people can get shot in their feet.
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."
-- or --
After correctly packaging your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream and shoot
yourself in the foot. When you try, however, you discover that your foot is of the wrong type.
Algol (60 or 68):
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.
Algol 60:
You spend hours trying to figure out how to fire the gun since it doesn't have any provision for input or output.
Algol 68:
You mildly deprocedure the gun, the bullet gets firmly dereferenced, and your foot is strongly coerced to void.
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.
-- or --
You shoot yourself in the foot, then spend all day figuring out how to do it fewer characters.
Assembly language:
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.
-- or --
You try to shoot yourself in the foot only to discover you must first reinvent the gun, the bullet, and your foot.
Basic:
Shoot self in foot with water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.
Visual Basic:
You'll shoot yourself in the foot, but you'll have so much fun doing it that you won't care.
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.
-- or --
You try to shoot yourself in the foot, but the gun won't fire unless it's aligned in column 8.
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.
Eiffel:
You take out a contract on your foot. The precondition is that there's a bullet in the gun, the postcondition is that there's
a hole in your foot.
Forth:
You yourself foot in shoot.
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.
Java:
You shoot yourself in the foot. Everyone else who accesses your website leaves hobbling and cursing.
Lisp:
You try to shoot yourself in the foot, but the gun jams on a stray parenthesis.
-- or --
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.
Pascal:
The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot.
Modula-2:
After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in the language, you shoot yourself in the head.
Perl:
You shoot yourself in the foot. You then decide it was so much fun that you invent another six completely different ways
to do it.
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.
-- or --
Since the bullet is a different type from your foot, the bullet automatically gets converted to another foot on arrival. It's
still difficult to walk afterwards.
Prolog:
You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot, but the bullet, failing to find its mark, backtracks to the gun which then
explodes in your face.
-- or --
You tell your program you want to be shot in the foot. The program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn't
allow it to explain.
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.
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.
-- or --
You shoot yourself in the foot, and your foot sends "doesNotUnderstand: Pain" to your brain.
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).
-- or --
If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot. If you fail, shoot yourself in the right foot.
Paradox:
Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your users can too.
Revelation:
You'll be able to shoot yourself in the foot just as soon as you figure out what all these bullets are for.
English:
You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off.
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.
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.
370 JCL:
You send your foot down to MIS with a 4000-page document explaining how you want it to be shot. Three years later,
your foot comes back deep-fried.
Unix:
% ls
foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o
% rm * .o
rm: .o: No such file or directory
% ls
%
Concurrent Euclid:
You shoot yourself in somebody else's foot.
HyperTalk:
Put the first bullet of the gun into foot left of leg of 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.