C: You shoot yourself in the foot.

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 hear a gunshot, and there’s a hole in your foot, but you don’t remember enough linear algebra to understand what the hell happened.

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.”

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 the language, you shoot yourself in the head.

sh, csh, etc.: 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.

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-processing ability.

Prolog: You tell your program that you want to be shot in the foot. The program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn’t permit it to explain it to you.

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.

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.

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 COLT45 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.

BASIC: Shoot self in foot with water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.

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.

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…

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: begin gun foot shot bullets not or blood until

English: You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off.

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.

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.

Eiffel: You create a GUN object, two FOOT objects and a BULLET object. The GUN passes both the FOOT objects a reference to the BULLET. The FOOT objects increment their hole counts and forget about the BULLET. A little demon then drives a garbage truck over your feet and grabs the bullet (both of it) on the way.

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.