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==Explanation==
 
==Explanation==
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This comic is a joke about how the person you were in the past can be viewed as a distinct entity from who you are now, as well as the predictability of future events relating to your future actions.
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{{incomplete|First attempt at explanation, taking over from the Bot, but probably debatable.}}
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The comic shows presumably a segment of a code transcript from an old project of Cueball's, this part entirely consisting of comments (a number of computer languages, including several popular dialects, use "#" to indicate "the remainder of this line is a comment") written with apparent foresight by the Cueball's 'younger self' in anticipation of being read by his 'older self' at some point in the future.
  
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The comic shows comments, informational notes left in the code that do not change the algorithm, from a project completed by [[Cueball]] some time ago that is still being used and maintained.  It is implied that Cueball is looking at these comments because the algorithm, a parsing function, is no longer working. These comments were written by Cueball's "younger self" in anticipation of being read by his "older self" at a date close to the present. The function has held up to the younger Cueball's expectations as it has lasted until the publication date of this comic, September 2014. The comments indicate a firm belief that the parsing function could not be easily "re-kludged" to handle the new situation but instead would need to be re-written.
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A "parse function" might well be some code that interprets some form of input (e.g. the text of a web-page that has been 'scraped' by another part of the code) and makes sense of it in a way that enables functionality in some other part of the code. For some reason this has now failed.  A likely explanation in the example case being that source web-site has revamped its pages and information display method, whether or not this is noticable by the human reader who only reads the page as rendered the browser and not the underlying code.
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These comments are surprisingly accurate, leading Cueball to rhetorically reply to his younger self that these comments were creepy. Cueball's "younger self" must have anticipated a snarky reply and reminded his older self that his older self has likely not fulfilled his dream of going to Iceland. Cueball again replies that his younger self should stop judging him.  
 
  
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In the title text, current-day Cueball lashes out at his younger self, further emphasizing the way he is viewing his past self as a different person, blaming the ineffectiveness of his past self's coding for never going to Iceland, even though the effectiveness of his past code has no correlation with being able to travel, unless he had to fix the code for a project, ruining the time space he had to travel, or his code helped him plan his trips.
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Certainly, that the parser has 'failed' indicates that it worked once but possibly it was {{w|kludge|kludged}} together with no expectation that it would handle expected future changes and a firm belief that those changes could not be easily 'rekludged' to handle the new situation but instead a proper re-write of the code needs to be done.  However, it seems to have lasted one year more than expected, by the younger Cueball.  This is probably more down to external factors (lazy web-site maintainers), however.
  
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A comment is a line, or a portion of a line, of code which should not be executed. A number of computer languages, including [[353: Python|Python]], use "#" to indicate "the remainder of this line is a comment". The comment symbol tells the compiler to skip to the next line, ignoring everything after the symbol. Programmers make use of comments to leave notes about what a particular line or section of code is meant to do, places that require debugging, ideas for future revisions, etc.
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Older cueball feels the need to retorically reply to his younger self's commentary, only to find a further foreward-looking snark that is both prescient and obviously emotionally hard-hitting. The title-text is a further come-back by the older-self, who lays the blame back upon the historic Cueball persona.
  
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The language in the comments is similar to how people address themselves in personal {{w|Time capsule|time capsules}}, in which they put letters away to read years later to see how much they've changed.
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Some people write letters to "future self", which they put away and read years later to see how much they've changed. In this comic, the letter wasn't written for entertainment purposes, but rather it is a comment in source code file in which Cueball of the past admitted he did a horrible job writing a parsing routine, and knew that somewhere in the future, he would have to go back to this code and fix some bug that wasn't the problem back then, but it turned out to be now. He knew that the code will be very hard to fix and left the letter as a reminder to not try to fix it and rewrite it from scratch instead. Cueball of the present, shown on the comic, is absolutely bewildered how accurate the note he left years ago is.
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A "{{w|Parsing#Parser|parse}} {{w|Subroutine|function}}" is code that interprets some form of input and makes sense of it in a way that enables functionality in some other part of the code. Parsers are commonly used to extract useful information from a source external to the algorithm.
 
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Often parsing functions are written using {{w|Regular expression|regular expressions}} or in some other {{w|write-only language}} style. Parsing can be a difficult problem to solve, and programmers will often take shortcuts (perform {{w|kludge|kludges}}) based on assumptions on the kinds of input that the parsing function will have to handle, or possibly code through means of trial-and-error.
 
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As the programmer may not have control over the input, such as reading a page from someone else's web-site or using the output of an unpredictable program, an input that does not match the assumed input syntax in can cause the parser to break, even if the parsing function has not changed.
 
  
 
==Transcript==
 
==Transcript==
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:[Cueball is sitting at a laptop, reading code. The two separate parts of code as well as the two comments by Cueball is connected with "speak" lines, with the line from the code going down to the computer screen.]
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{{incomplete transcript}}
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:<nowiki>#</nowiki> Dear Future Self,
 
:<nowiki>#</nowiki> Dear Future Self,
 
:<nowiki>#</nowiki>
 
:<nowiki>#</nowiki>
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:Cueball: Stop judging me!
 
:Cueball: Stop judging me!
 
{{comic discussion}}
 
{{comic discussion}}
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[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
 
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
 
[[Category:Programming]]
 
[[Category:Programming]]

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