A tourist walks into a pet shop in Silicon Valley, 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 $5,000″. 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?”
“Oh”, says the shopkeeper, “that monkey can program in C with very
fast, tight code, no bugs, well worth the money.” The tourist starts to
look at the monkeys in the cage.
He says to the shop keeper, “That one’s even more expensive, $10,000!
What does it do?”
“Oh”, says the shopkeeper, “that one’s a C++ monkey; it can manage
object-oriented programming, Visual C++, even some Java, all the very
useful stuff.” The tourist looks round for a little longer and sees a
third monkey in a cage on its own. The price tag round its neck says
$50,000.
He gasps to the shop keeper, “That one costs more than all the others
put together! What on earth does it do?”
“Well,” says the shopkeeper, “I don’t know if it actually does
anything, but it says it’s a Consultant.”
