Task: Shoot Yourself in the Foot

Assembly

You try to shoot yourself in the foot, only to discover you must first invent the gun, the bullet, the trigger, and your foot. After you have invented the gun, the bullet, the trigger and your foot, 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.

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 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 read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue with the attempts to shoot yourself anyways because you have no exception-handling capability.

Pascal

The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot, because the bullets are the wrong type and won't pass through the barrel. Instead the gun explodes.

Ada

After correctly packing 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 you can't because your foot is of the wrong type. (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.")

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 re-tied.

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
you shoot yourself in the appendage 
    which holds the gun with which you
...

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
you shoot yourself in the appendage 
    which holds the gun with which you
    ...
but none of the other appendages are aware
    of this happening.

FORTH

1. Foot in yourself shoot
2. You yourself foot shoot.
3. First you decide to leave the number of toes lost on the stack and then implement the "foot-toes@" word which takes 3 numbers from the stack: foot number, range and projectile mass (in slugs) and changes the current vocabulary to 'blue'. While testing this word you get arrested by the police for mooning (remember this is a bottom-up language) who demonstrate the far better top-down approach to damaging yourself.

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.

BASIC

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

Visual Basic

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

HyperTalk

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

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.

APL

You shoot yourself in the foot, then spend all day figuring out how to do it in fewer characters. Also, 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.

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

Unix (Shell)

% ls
foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o
% rm * .o
rm:.o no such file or directory
% ls
%

Concurrent Euclid

You shoot yourself in somebody else's 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.

Revelation

You're sure you're going to be able to shoot yourself in the foot, just as soon as you figure out what all these nifty little bullet-thingies are for.

Modula2

After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in this language, you shoot yourself in the head.

sh, csh, &c.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

Logo

You navigate your gun successfully to your foot using nice movement commands, but find there is no way to shoot.

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.

INFORMIX

The first gun doesn't work. Three months later INFORMIX's support desk send another gun which doesn't match the version number of the bullets. INFORMIX suggest you upgrade to INFORMIX-ONLINE. You pull the trigger and your shoe gets wet.

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 takes 27 people to pull it. ORACLE provides 26 consultants 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 your sandals. You decide to buy INGRES. Richard Donkin shoots you in the foot.

INGRES

You pull the trigger, and your identical twin in San Franciso gets shot. You then turn off distributed query optimisation.

SYBASE

You carelessly invoke the procedure sp_insert_bullet() which fires a trigger (neat, eh) on the table GUN. To maintain referential integrity, the system invokes another trigger which inserts bullets in your other foot, your shins, your thighs, pelvis and so on up to the cranium. You are left in third normal form.

OCCAM

You send a message to your finger, which sends a message to the trigger, which sends a message to the firing pin, which sends a message to the primer, which sends a message to the firing charge, which sends a message to the bullet which sends a very unpleasant message to your foot. The pipeline continues to run, a hail of bullets emerging from the output channel and drilling their way via your foot to the centre of the earth. The high velocity arrival of such stupendous amounts of lead creates a density shock-wave which eventually collapses beyond its own event horizon. The black hole thus formed goes on to absorb earth, most of the minor planets and the Sun. The problems of your foot become increasingly insignificant during this process. Hyper intelligent beings from the planet Zorg nod their several heads wisely and confide to each other: 'I always said Tony was a complete twat.'

RTL

You start to really shoot yourself in the foot, but 6 slugs is too many for an array and blows the compiler to pieces. Eventually you realise you must rebuild the compiler to allow such huge arrays. This is so stupid and boring that you start shoot yourself, but just in time you are interrupted by...

Java

You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot using a bullet that will work in any gun in the world. But you discover that the "Microsoft Gun" is actually a cross bow.

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