Christian Montoya

How to shoot yourself in the foot with different programming languages

cutlerish:

C

You shoot yourself in the foot.

C++

You accidently 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 to other instances of you, saying “that’s me over there”.

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 facility.

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…

BASIC

Shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.

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.

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.

or

No.

PL/I

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.

Postscript

It takes the bullet ten minutes to travel from the gun to your foot, by which time you’re long since gone out to lunch. The text comes out great, though.

Assembly Language

You try to shoot yourself in the foot only to discover you must first reinvent the gun, the bullet, and your foot. It takes you three weeks to load the round and aim the gun. When you squeeze the trigger, the gun beeps several times, then crashes.

Java

The gun fires just fine, but your foot can’t figure out what the bullets are for and ignores them.

PHP

You shoot yourself in the foot with a gun made with pieces from 300 other guns.

Perl

You shoot yourself in the foot, but nobody can understand how you did it. Six months later, neither can you.

Javascript

You’ve perfected a robust, rich user experience for shooting yourself in the foot. You then find that bullets are disabled on your gun.

never gets old.