EnergyMech: Programming Languages

YET ANOTHER 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 emergency 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 here".

JAVA
You can't shoot yourself in the foot. There must be a virtual foot around here somewhere, though...

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

FORTH
Foot in yourself shoot.

Assembler
You shoot yourself in the foot with a laser, but only after bouncing it off a nearby satellite.

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.

PERL
You shoot yourself in the foot, but you *still* can't find the gun.

COBOL
USEing a COLT 45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place ARM.HAND.FINGER on HANDGUN.TRIGGER and SQUEEZE, THEN return HANDGUN to HOLDSTER. CHECK whether shoelace needs to be retied.

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 ...

BASIC
Shoot yourself 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 don't care.

Prolog
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.

ML
You aim the gun, then supply it with a foot to shoot. If this is impossible, supply it with a phone directory, and let it hunt you down. Note that even if you are a centipede, it will *still only need one bullet*.

Modula-2
After realizing that you can't accomplish anything in this language, you shoot yourself in the head.

Modula-3
You can't shoot yourself in the foot, because it's BAD PROGRAMMING PRACTICE to have a foot. So you shoot yourself in the head instead (if someone, somewhere, has defined a method for head shooting).

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

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

Concurrent Euclid
You shoot yourself in somebody else's foot.

HyperTalk
Put the first bullet of the gun into the 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.

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 to shoot yourself in the foot, just as soon as you figure out what all these bullets are for.

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.

ADA
Sorry, this gun is the wrong type for your foot. Please put your foot in front of this cannon instead. Thank you.

Smalltalk
Please come back when you've told the bullets how to fly. Ah, thank you. *BANG*

PVM
Okay, how many toes do we have? Okay you all ready? Sure? Okay, okay, wait for it... *BANG* (The toes are shot off in parallel, but they only hurt one at a time).

HTML
Look at this really pretty gun. Now, if you'll just click <A HREF="http://foot.html">here<A>...

TeX
You shoot yourself in the foot, and the remains get *really neatly* arranged over the floor (even if you don't want them to be).

LaTeX
Your foot still gets neatly arranged, and it takes you less time to aim, but somehow that bit of bone isn't quite right...

PostScript
Hang on, there was a gun I defined a while ago, and it looked *really* nice...

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

OS/2
Point to Body and click, point to leg and click, point to lower leg and click, point to foot and gun goes click.

DOS
You can't get to either foot from here.

Windows
You'd shoot yourself in the foot, but you die of old age between pulling the trigger and the gun going off. Then the gun self-destructs.

Windows 95
You shoot yourself in the foot, but only after a pretty animation of blood spurting all over the place.