A tourist walks into a pet shop in Silicon Valley, and is browsing round 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". The customer pays and walks out with his monkey.

Startled, the tourist goes over to the shopkeeper. "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, well worth the money".

The tourist looks at the monkeys in that 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 programming, Visual C++, even some Java, all the really 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 shopkeeper, "That one costs more than all the others put together! What on earth does it do?"

"Well, I don't know if it does anything, but it says it's a contractor."