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 fitted 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 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++, and 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 others 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."