TLChuck.wps
Expensive Monkeys
A tourist walked into a pet shop near Microsoft’s corporate
headquarters 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. Most of them are only a few hundred
dollars. Why did it cost so much?”
The shopkeeper answered, “Ah, that monkey can program a computer
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 it says it’s an engineer.”