A tourist walked into a pet shop and was looking at the animals on
display. While he was there, another customer walked in and said to the
shopkeeper,
"I'll have a C monkey please."
The shopkeeper
nodded, went over to a cage at the side of the shop and took out a monkey. He
fit a collar and leash, handed it to the customer, saying,
"That'll
be $5000."
The customer paid and walked out with his monkey.
Startled, the tourist went over to the shopkeeper and said,
"That
was a very expensive monkey. Why did it cost so much?"
The
shopkeeper answered, "Ah, that monkey can program in C very fast, tight code,
no bugs, well worth the money."
The tourist looked at the monkey in
another cage.
"That one's even more expensive! $10,000! 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," said the
shopkeeper. The tourist looked around for a little longer and saw a third
monkey in a cage of its own. The price tag around its neck read $50,000. He
gasped to the shopkeeper,
"That one costs more than all the other
put together! What on earth does it do?"
The shopkeeper replied,
"Well, I haven't actually seen it do anything, but the other monkeys call him
the project manager."