A bad citizen in Javaland (2006)
I was about to dismiss this story as silly, but then it occurred to me that the reason this is so funny is not because Java is a bad language per se, but that it really didn't work well for programmers who don't understand Object Orientation. I've read more than my fair share of code that reads exactly like this story because of this lack of programmer understanding.<p>Consider:<p><i>You are born with no body parts.</i><p><pre><code>    Person me = new Person();
</code></pre>
<i>Should anyone attempt to interact with you before your organs have finished arriving you will die.</i><p><pre><code>    me.interact();
</code></pre>
Throws a NullPointerException because the class designer improperly initialized the instance. The designer should have provided a constructor.<p><pre><code>    public static Person() {
        this.organs = new Organs();
    }
</code></pre>
<i>One by one, your organs are pushed into you.</i><p>Instead, the class designer probably followed the JavaBean pattern and provided a setter method for Organs:<p><pre><code>    public void setOrgans(Organs organs) {
        this.organs = organs;
    }
</code></pre>
etc.<p>(For those that don't remember: The JavaBean idea arose because early versions of Java had no way of performing introspection, something that software tools really, really need. JavaBeans broke object encapsulation by design. Many programmers had to write beans to take advantage of their tools, and learned a very bad habit.)