Sad
Sad
[Cueball is walking up to Ponytail who sits at her desk in an office chair typing on her computer.] Cueball: How are you doing? Ponytail: Hah. Cueball: You seem distant lately. For the past few months. Ponytail: Can't imagine why.
[Cueball talks to Ponytail at her desk from off-panel.] Cueball (off-panel): Your projects have stagnated. Ponytail: But my Stardew Valley farm is doing great . Cueball (off-panel): You can't just hide from everything. Ponytail: Fact check : Mostly false.
[In a frame-less panel Cueball is seen standing behind Ponytail at her desk.] Cueball: I'm glad you're including more comments in your code, but it would be nice if they were comments about your code. Cueball: Or at least a bit less obscenity-filled. Ponytail: Look, they say to write what you know.
[Cueball leans forward towards Ponytail at her desk (who has looked on the screen in the same position through the entire comic).] Cueball: All the functions you've written take everything passed to them and return it unchanged with the comment "No, you deal with this." Ponytail: It's a functional programming thing. Avoiding side effects. Cueball: You avoid all effects. Ponytail: Only way to be sure.

The comic is about Cueball confronting Ponytail over her recent behavior and poor emotional state over the past few months. While Ponytail doesn't give any details on what's causing it, it can be inferred that she is referring to the recent election of Donald Trump as President of the United States , which happened about 2 months prior to the publication of this comic. This is a common reaction in the United States whenever a new president is elected, as the voters who did not vote for the new/upcoming President will be feeling unpleasant emotions that their chosen candidate did not win, and will want to express these emotions to the wider world. With the advent of the internet, and more recently social media, the expressions of these emotions have grown more common and often more hyperbolic, regardless of the quality of the candidate.
Ponytail has retreated to video games for solace to the point that her real life projects are suffering. Stardew Valley is a video game in which a player creates and manages a virtual farm. And when Cueball mentions that her projects have stagnated, she retorts that her farm in the game is doing great. A comic with the name of that game was releases only two weeks later, 1797: Stardew Valley , indicating that it is indeed Randall who has played this game excessively.
Cueball's statement about not being able to hide from everything is a common one to give to insecure people or to those trying to run away from their problems. Ponytail's reply is in the form of a PolitiFact reply, claiming (possibly quite truly) that such assertions are mostly false , one of the six options, but it is far from being the worst, thus acknowledging that you can't hide from everything, just mostly. Politifact.com was also the subject of an earlier comic, 1712: Politifact .
In computer programming, comments are pieces of non-functional, descriptive text that programmers include in their code. Typically, they are used as a form of documentation, to make the code easier for other developers to understand. This is why Cueball is glad that Ponytail is at least writing more comments; documentation is something that's often neglected by developers, despite its usefulness. Unfortunately, the comments that Ponytail is putting in her code are not actually about the code at all; she is, presumably, commenting more generally on whatever is troubling her as a way of venting her issues.
Ponytail's reply to "write what you know" is a common piece of advice given to amateur fiction writers - it means that writers tend to write best when they are writing about something they personally know well, since they will have plenty of interesting and useful experience to draw from. However, since Ponytail's comments are full of obscenities, she is sarcastically suggesting that obscenity is all she currently knows.
Functions are reusable pieces of code which developers create to avoid repetition and make the code more organized. For example, if the code often has to calculate the distance between two points, it makes sense to place that calculation logic into a "calculateDistance" function, which can then just be called whenever it is needed. More generally, a function accepts inputs (eg. the coordinates of two points) and may return an output (eg. the distance between the two points).
Cueball notes, however, that all of the functions Ponytail has written are not actually doing anything with their inputs; they are just returning them straight back again and demanding that the calling code should deal with the problem itself. This makes the functions practically useless. Ponytail sardonically tries to justify this as a functional programming technique by saying that she is "avoiding side effects". A side effect is a situation in programming in which an isolated piece of code changes something about the global state of the program - this can be problematic, as there could be other parts of the code that were not expecting the change, and might behave differently as a result. Their different behavior is a side effect . Sometimes side effects are intentional, but when they are not, they can be tricky to debug and fix.
Functional programming is a programming paradigm in which most or all computation is performed within the scope of self-contained functions, thus avoiding stateful behavior entirely. This removes the possibility of any side effects, since each function only knows what it is told via its inputs, and does not need to be concerned with anything happening outside of itself. Technically, Ponytail is adhering to this paradigm, but only in the sense that her functions are not doing anything at all , and so cannot have side effects.
Cueball fairly makes this point by noting she is avoiding all effects, to which Ponytail quotes part of a famous quote from Ripley in Aliens : I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure . By replying that it's the " only way to be sure " she is thus indirectly saying better safe than sorry, but in reality she just doesn't care about her programming anymore because of her sad state of mind.
The title text is a pun, interpreting the phrase "side effect" literally. If you turn an object 90 degrees along the right axis you will place it on its side, so thus making it a effect of putting something on its side, or a "side effect." You can also turn 90 degrees (along another axis), facing what was previously your side.
Sadness could come from many causes (breaking up, family member dying etc). However, the notion that this comic is political is supported by the fact check in the second panel, and also that this was only the second comic released after Donald Trump 's inauguration . This comic gave rise to this page: Sad comics . It was the fourth very sad/negative comic in a bit more than two months after the election and the page describes the relations of these comics and others which relates to election or politics related to Donald Trumps presidency.
[Cueball is walking up to Ponytail who sits at her desk in an office chair typing on her computer.] Cueball: How are you doing? Ponytail: Hah. Cueball: You seem distant lately. For the past few months. Ponytail: Can't imagine why.
[Cueball talks to Ponytail at her desk from off-panel.] Cueball (off-panel): Your projects have stagnated. Ponytail: But my Stardew Valley farm is doing great . Cueball (off-panel): You can't just hide from everything. Ponytail: Fact check : Mostly false.
[In a frame-less panel Cueball is seen standing behind Ponytail at her desk.] Cueball: I'm glad you're including more comments in your code, but it would be nice if they were comments about your code. Cueball: Or at least a bit less obscenity-filled. Ponytail: Look, they say to write what you know.
[Cueball leans forward towards Ponytail at her desk (who has looked on the screen in the same position through the entire comic).] Cueball: All the functions you've written take everything passed to them and return it unchanged with the comment "No, you deal with this." Ponytail: It's a functional programming thing. Avoiding side effects. Cueball: You avoid all effects. Ponytail: Only way to be sure.
