Friday Humor: Primate Programming, Inc.

["Smith, Martin" <Martin -dot- Smith -at- mdx -dot- com>]

For all of you who get riled about the prospect of high tech jobs being
outsourced to foreign countries at lower rates, there is a new threat on the
horizon--the prospect of replacing technical writers and computer
programmers with great apes who work for 68 cents an hour (plus bananas).

There is even a web site http://www.newtechusa.com/PPI/aboutus.asp where you
can outsource your projects to great apes trained in natural languages and
Visual Studio.net.

My favorite excerpt from the site:

"What are the issues regarding open source programming?
Hominids will not share source code and can be very territorial when
programming. For this reason we do not recommend Primate Programming for
open source projects.

What about software testing? 
Great apes (hominids) do not have tails, while monkeys do. Research
indicates that great apes are very productive in the areas of software
maintenance and report writing, while most monkeys will struggle. Monkeys
however are great at software testing. So the rule of thumb is, if you don't
have a tail, you can probably program."

The NewTech Daily also has a feature story about Primate Programming Inc.
http://www.newtechusa.com/humor/PPevolution.asp under the headline "Chimps
"Get" VB.NET & ASP.NET Training 
Simplicity of Microsoft's .NET Technology Triggers IT Evolution."

Another excerpt:
"Some Primate Programmers are publishing their own Blogs. Because of their
very granular manual dexterity, primates can type, and produce documentation
and web pages. The Blog trend has been pioneered with the site "Rambling of
a Code Monkey", authored by a chimpanzee programmer with 7 years experience
in VB and Java, named Milbertus. The Blog details the emerging alpha-chimp
cyber-punk subculture."

Happy Friday,

Martin R. Smith
Thomson Micromedex, Inc.