Shoot Yourself in the Foot

Maybe you’ve seen one of those funny quick guides to programming languages based on Bjarne Stroustrup’s “foot shooting”, like the one I found on Michael Thompson’s blog (this is the most complete list of languages I’ve seen so far). Read it first if you haven’t.

Here’s my two cents.

PHP: You shoot yourself in the foot and spend the rest of the week making sure that nobody else can pull the trigger of your gun which is now stuck between your belt and your belly. That involves both gun, belt, and room tweaking.

Java: You find that the standard implementation of RFC NNN-1 (Gun) lacks the trigging mechanism, so you check Apache Commons if they have an alternative. They do, bit it doesn’t fit the standard implementation of RFC NNN-2 (Bullet), and there is no Commons’ alternative to that one. You are in the middle of implementing your own Bullet when someone says there is already a project for that. You download a shareware version which turns out to be a blank shot. You pay for the armed one but they never send it to you. In the end, you take the standard implementation of RFC XXX (Axe) and chop your foot off.