A tourist walks into a pet shop in Silicon Valley, and is browsing
round the cages on display. While he's there, another customer walks
in and says to the shopkeeper, "I'll have a C monkey, please."
The shopkeeper nods, goes over to a cage at the side of the shop and
takes out a monkey. He fits a collar and leash and hands it to the
customer, saying "That'll be $5000." The customer pays and walks out
with his monkey.
Startled, the tourist goes over to the shopkeeper. "That was a very
expensive monkey - most of them are only a few hundred dollars. Why
did it cost so much?"
"Ah, that monkey can program in C - very fast, tight code, no bugs,
well worth the money."
The tourist looks at the monkeys in that cage. "That one's even more
expensive - $10,000 dollars! What does it do?"
"Oh, that one's a C++ monkey - it can manage object oriented
programming, Visual C++, even some Java, all the really useful stuff."
The tourist looks round for a little longer and sees a third monkey
in a cage on its own. The price tag round its neck says $50,000. He
gasps to the shopkeeper, "That one costs more than all the others put
together! What on earth does it do?"
"Well, I don't know if it does anything, but it says it's a
contractor."
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