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 consultant.”