A tourist walks into a pet shop in Redmond, WA and is browsing around the cages on display. While he's there, another customer walks in and says to the shopkeeper, "I'll have a C Monkey, please." The shopkeeper nods, goes over to a cage at the side of the shop and takes out a monkey. He fits a collar and leash and hands it to the customer saying, "That'll be $5000.00."
The customer pays and walks out with his monkey. Startled, the tourist goes over to the shopkeeper and says "That was a very expensive monkey - most of them are only a few hundred dollars. Why did it cost so much?"
"Ah, that monkey can program in C - very fast, tight code, no bugs, Y2K compliant, well worth the money."
The tourist looks at the monkey in another cage. "That one's even more expensive - $10,000 dollars! What does it do?"
"Oh, that one's a C++ Monkey; it can manage object-oriented Windows programming, Visual C++, even some Java, all the really useful stuff."
The tourist looks around for a little longer and sees a third monkey in a cage of its own. The price tag around its neck says $50,000. He gasps to the shopkeeper, "That one costs more than all the others put together! What on earth does it do?"
"Well, I haven't actually seen it do anything, but it says it's a contractor."
