This post comes courtesy of the great source, Peter SJF Bance. His Friday Funny mailing list is a fantastic place to find humorous anecdotes about nearly everything, including old and new workplace and technology trials and tribulations.
With this offering, he explains, “here’s one of my old favorites (I received it in 2001, by which time it was already pretty old, but this version with some added extras by an old University chum).”
Shooting Yourself in the Foot (in multiple languages)
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C
You shoot yourself in the foot.
C, with Software Engineer as the gunner
You hold a bullet in the left hand, and with the right hand try to strike the firing cap using a sewing pin in the right hand: you try to do this hard enough and precisely enough that the bullet fires, hoping that it’s well enough aimed to hit your 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 bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying, “That’s me, over there.”
Java
The bullet moves so slowly that you die of old age waiting for it to arrive at your foot. But it moves with beautiful swirling graphics, tho’
Java (alternative)
You point the gun at your foot. Suddenly you need far larger shoes…then the power fails, the lights go out, and your leg drops off. A passer by mentions that with a few minor changes, you could also use that gun to shoot a cow’s nose off.
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.
Perl
You find an incredibly small and deadly looking hold-out pistol, and some bullets specially designed for shooting your specific type of foot. However, the bullets don’t seem to quite fit the gun, and you can’t find any documentation to explain where the safety catch is.
XML
You point gun at leg, and no longer have space to pull the trigger.
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!”
Ada 95
You hold your foot up inside the smallest window in the house, and the U S DoD put a cruise missile through the window.
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.
BASIC
Shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.
Visual BASIC
You shoot yourself in the foot, but you’ll have so much fun doing it that you won’t care.
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…
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.
MS-DOS (all versions)
You finally found the gun, but you can’t locate the file with the foot for the life of you.
MacOS
Double click the gun icon and a window giving a selection for guns, target areas, plus balloon help with medical remedies, and assorted sound effects. Click ‘shoot button’ and a small bomb appears with note “Error of type 1 has occurred.”
UNIX shell script
$ ls
foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o
$ rm * .o
rm: .o: No such file or directory
$ ls
$
sh, csh…
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.
Algol
You shoot yourself in the foot with a musket. The musket is aesthetically fascinating, and the wound baffles the adolescent medic in the emergency room.
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 HOLSTER. CHECK whether shoelace needs to be retied.
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 routine.
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.
FORTH
Foot in yourself shoot.
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; then spend all day figuring out how to do it in fewer characters.
Pascal
The compiler won’t let you shoot yourself in the foot
ML
Since the gun and your foot are not of the same type, you wind up stomping on one foot with the other.
Modula-2
After realizing that you can’t actually accomplish anything in the language, you shoot yourself in the head.
HyperTalk
Put the first bullet of the gun into foot left of leg you. Answer the result.
PL/I
You consume all available system resources, including all the offline bullets. The Data Processing and Payroll Department doubles in 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).
Motif
You spend days writing a UIL description of your foot, the trajectory, the bullet, and the intricate scrollwork on the ivory handle of the gun. When you finally get around to pulling the trigger, the gun jams.
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 in the first place.
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.
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.
English
You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off.
