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How to Shoot Yourself In the Foot

The proliferation of modern programming languages (all of which seem to have stolen countless features from one another) 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 dilemmas.

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 at others and saying "That's me, over there."

FORTRAN

You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes; then you shoot the sixth bullet anyway since no exception processing was anticipated.

Modula-2

After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in this language, you shoot yourself in the head.
or
You perform a shooting on what might be currently a foot with what might be currently a bullet shot by what might currently be a gun.

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.

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 (interpreted)

You shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol until your leg is waterlogged and rots off.

BASIC (compiled)

You shoot yourself in the foot with a BB using a SCUD missile launcher.

Visual Basic

You'll really only appear to have shot yourself in the foot, but you'll have so much fun doing it that you won't care.

APL

You shoot yourself in the foot; then spend all day figuring out how to do it in fewer characters.
or
You hear a gunshot and there's a hole in your foot, but you don't remember enough linear algebra to understand what happened.
or
@#&^$%&%^ foot

Pascal

The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot.
or
Same as Modula-2 except that the bullet is not the right type for the gun and your hand is blown off.

Forth

Foot yourself in the shoot.
or
BULLET DUP3 * GUN LOAD FOOT AIM TRIGGER PULL BANG! EMIT DEAD IF DROP ROT THEN (This takes about five bytes of memory, executes in two to ten clock cycles on any processor and can be used to replace any existing function of the language as well as in any future words). (Welcome to bottom up programming - where you, too, can perform compiler pre-processing instead of writing code)

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).
or
If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot. If you fail, shoot yourself in the right foot.

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.
or
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.

Scheme

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

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.

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."
or
The Department of Defense shoots you in the foot after offering you a blindfold and a last cigarette.
or
After correctly packaging your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream and shoot yourself in the foot. When you try, however, you discover that your foot is of the wrong type.

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.

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

foot bullets 6 locate loadgun aim gun shoot showpage

PERL

You stab yourself in the foot repeatedly with an incredibly large and very heavy Swiss Army knife.
or
You pick up the gun and begin to load it. The gun and your foot begin to grow to huge proportions and the world around you slows down, until the gun fires. It makes a tiny hole, which you don't feel.

Assembly Language

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.
or
You try to shoot yourself in the foot only to discover you must first reinvent the gun, the bullet, and your foot.

Hypertalk

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

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.

Powerbuilder

While attempting to load the gun you discover that the LoadGun system function is buggy; as a work around you tape the bullet to the outside of the gun and unsuccessfully attempt to fire it with a nail. In frustration you club your foot with the butt of the gun and explain to your client that this approximates the functionality of shooting yourself in the foot and that the next version of Powerbuilder will fix it.

Here's an extension that looks at operating systems

Unix

You shoot yourself in the foot
or
% ls
foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o
% rm * .o
rm: .o: No such file or directory
% ls
%

370 JCL

You send your foot down to MIS with a 4000-page document explaining how you want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot comes back deep-fried.

VMS

$ MOUNT/DENSITY=.45/LABEL=BULLET/MESSAGE="BYE" BULLET::BULLET$GUN SYS$BULLET
$ SET GUN/LOAD/SAFETY=OFF/SIGHT=NONE/HAND=LEFT/CHAMBER=1/ACTION=AUTOMATIC/ 
  LOG/ALL/FULL SYS$GUN_3$DUA3:[000000]GUN.GNU
$ SHOOT/LOG/AUTO SYS$GUN SYS$SYSTEM:[FOOT]FOOT.FOOT 

%DCL-W-ACTIMAGE, error activating image GUN 
-CLI-E-IMGNAME, image file $3$DUA240:[GUN]GUN.EXE;1 
-IMGACT-F-NOTNATIVE, image is not an OpenVMS Alpha AXP image

sh,csh, etc

You can't remember the syntax for anything, so you spend five hours reading manual pages, then your foot falls asleep. You shoot the computer and switch to C.

Apple System 7

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."

Windows 3.1

Double click the gun icon and wait. Eventually a window opens giving a selection for guns, target areas, plus balloon help with medical remedies, and assorted sound effects. Click "shoot" button and a small box appears with 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.

Windows NT

The gun is so huge and unwieldy that you have to keep swapping it from one hand to the other.

CP/M

I remember when shooting yourself in the foot with a BB gun was a big deal.

DOS

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

Linux

Generous programmers from around the world all join forces to help you shoot yourself in the foot for free.

IRIX

The Terminator shoots you in the foot. A T-Rex bites your other foot.

VM/CMS

IBM shoots you in the foot

Cray

You shoot yourself in the foot with an Uzi.

And yet some more...

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.
or
You buy a gun. Bullets are only available from another company and are promised to work so you buy them. Then you find out that the next version of the gun is the one scheduled to actually shoot bullets.

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. (For those who don't know, English is a McDonnell Douglas/PICK query language which allegedly requires 110% of system resources to run happily.)

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.

troff

rmtroff -ms -Hdrwp | lpr -Pwp2 & .*place bullet in footer .B .NR FT +3i .in 4 .bu Shoot! .br .sp .in -4 .br .bp NR HD -2i .*

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.