An oldie but a goodie...
A 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 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."
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.
APL
You heard a gunshot, and there's a hole in your foot, but you don't remember enough linear algebra to understand what the hell happened.
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 this language, you shoot yourself in the head.
PASCAL
Same as Modula-2, except the bullets are the wrong type and won't pass through the barrel. The gun explodes.
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.
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.
HYPERCARD
Put the first bullet of gun into foot left of leg of you. Answer the result.
FORTRAN
You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you have no exception processing ability.
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.
MOTIF
You spend days writing a UIL description of your foot, the bullet, its trajectory, and the intricate scrollwork on the ivory handles of the gun. When you finally get around to pulling the trigger, the gun jams.
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 shoelaces need to be retied.
BASIC
Shoot self in foot with a water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.
VISUAL BASIC
You shoot yourself in the foot, but have so much fun doing it that you don't care.
PL/I
You consume all available system resources, including all the offline bullets. The Data Processing and 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).
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...
ORACLE
ORACLE sells you a gun, a box of bullets, a holster, a cardboard mock-up of a wild-west town, and a stetson. You find the trigger, which takes 27 people to pull. ORACLE provides 26 consultants, all with holsters, cardboard mock-ups, and stetsons. The bullet doesn't leave the gun barrel and you hire four more ORACLE consultants to optimise. The bullet bounces off of your sandals. You decide to buy INGRES. Richard Donkin shoots you in the foot.
370 JCL
You send your foot down to MIS and include a 400-page document explaining exactly how you want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot comes back deep-fried.
PARADOX
Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your users can, too.
ACCESS
You try to point the gun at your foot, but it shoots holes in all your Borland distribution diskettes instead.
JAVA
You can shoot your foot with a standalone interpreter, but a Java applet won't let you access your foot.
