Gratuitous geek humor from the past

[unixronin]

Instructions for Shooting Yourself in the Foot in Various Computer Languages and Systems Interfaces

The proliferation of modern programming languages (all of which seem to have stolen countless features from each other) sometimes makes it difficult to remember what language you're currently using.  This guide is offered as a public service to help programmers who find themselves in such a dilemma.

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 medical assistance is impossible since you can't tell which are the bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying, "That's me, over there."

FORTRAN:

You shoot yourself in the 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.

MODULA-2:

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

PASCAL:

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

Alternate:  Same as MODULA-2, but the bullets are the wrong type and won't pass through the gun's barrel.  The gun explodes.

APL:

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

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

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 the feet."

ALGOL:

You shoot yourself in the foot with an ancient musket.  The musket is aesthetically fascinating, and the wound bewilders the medic at the hospital's emergency room.

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 (the gun with which (you ... ))))))))))))

SCHEME:

As LISP, but none of the other appendages are aware of this happening.

COBOL:

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

BASIC:

Shoot yourself in the 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.

FORTH:

Foot in yourself shoot.

UNIX shell:

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

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

TCL:

You repeatedly try to shoot yourself in the foot, but the gun keeps failing to fire because there is a syntax error.  You try to fix the syntax errors, but can't find anything that looks wrong.  Eventually you give up and try to rewrite the code to shoot yourself in the head instead, just to make the misery stop, but the interpreter says your head isn't a scalar object.

PERL:

After trying to understand the syntax, you smash your forehead repeatedly onto the keyboard in frustration.  When you accidentally hit Enter, the gun goes into an infinite loop recursively shooting every foot in the room.  When the ejected cases land on the floor, they spell out the complete works of Shakespeare.

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.

Alternate:  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.

ASSEMBLER:

You crash the OS and clobber the boot disk. The system administrator shoots you in the foot. After a moment of introspection, the system administrator shoots him(her)self in the foot and hops madly around the room shooting at everyone in sight.

PL/1:

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.

370 JCL:

You send your foot down to the MIS department with a 4000 page document explaining how you want it to be shot.  Three years later, your foot comes back deep fried with a bill for $375,000.00.

NEURAL NETWORKS:

You train the network in how to shoot your foot, after which it generalizes and keeps trying to locate some guy named Connor on the net...

GENETIC ALGORITHMS:

You create 10,000 strings describing the best way to shoot yourself in the foot.  By the time the program produces the optimal solution, humans have evolved wings and the problem is moot.

HYPERTALK:

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

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.

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).

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.

APPLE SYSTEM 7:

Double click the gun icon and a window appears giving a selection for guns and target areas, plus balloon help with medical remedies, and assorted sound effects.  Click the "shoot" button, and a small bomb appears with a note "An error of Type 1 has occurred".

WINDOWS:

Double click the gun icon and wait.  Eventually a window opens giving a selection for guns and target areas, plus balloon help with medical remedies, and assorted sound effects.  Click the "shoot" button and a small box appears with a note "Unable to open Shoot.dll, check that path is correct."

WINDOWS 95:

Your gun is not compatible with this OS and you must buy an upgrade and install it before you can continue.  Then you will be informed that you don't have enough memory.

DOS:

You finally found the gun, but can't for the life of you locate the file containing the foot.

BeOS:

You try to shoot yourself in the foot, but the ammunition can't be ported to your gun's proprietary chamber.  It explodes on the feed ramp instead, leaving you with a ringing headache and some nasty powder burns.  Your foot is untouched.

PARADOX:

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

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, V1.0:

You pull the trigger, but it turns out that the gun was a poorly designed hand grenade and the whole building blows up.

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.

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 bullets fits has not yet been built, but should be arriving in the mail Real Soon Now....

ENGLISH:

You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off.

FidoNet:

You put your foot in your mouth, then echo it internationally.

INTERNET:

You put your foot in your mouth, shoot it, then spam the bullet so that everybody gets shot in the foot.

Comments

[hugh_mannity]

LOL!

The scary part is how many of those languages I've actually spent time working with. I've been in this business too long!

[lebo-superman.livejournal.com]

LOL! Thanks for the much needed humor!

[dafydd.livejournal.com]

I LOL'ed at the Visual Basic one...