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."