Perl Problems
Perl Problems
[Man with sunglasses talking (or, alternatively, rapping) to Cueball.] Sunglasses: If you're havin' perl problems I feel bad for you, son-
Sunglasses: I got 99 problems,
Sunglasses: So I used regular expressions.
Sunglasses: Now I have 100 problems.

Perl is a scripting language that makes heavy use of regular expressions , which are good for dealing with large amounts of text quickly. In the comic, the man wearing sunglasses parodies the song " 99 Problems " in which the rapper Jay-Z says:
If you're havin' girl problems I feel bad for you, son- I got 99 problems, But a bitch ain't one.
In the comic however, the rapper tries to solve his problems with Perl's regular expressions, and ends up only creating another problem for himself, which is a reference to a famous quote by Jamie Zawinski (whose name could also be shortened to "Jay-Z"): "Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems." (This quote was revisited in 1313: Regex Golf .)
"program --help" is a common way, originating with the GNU project, to ask a program to show documentation on its usage and supported parameters; which, for some program, could include a "-z" command-line argument ("flag"), so the command would read "jay -z". In this case, it is just an obvious play on the rapper's name. jay is also an actual C program that is a compiler-compiler for java, but it doesn't have a "-z" flag.
This sort of problematically recursive self-reference is reminiscent of comic 927: Standards , and 1739: Fixing Problems .
[Man with sunglasses talking (or, alternatively, rapping) to Cueball.] Sunglasses: If you're havin' perl problems I feel bad for you, son-
Sunglasses: I got 99 problems,
Sunglasses: So I used regular expressions.
Sunglasses: Now I have 100 problems.
