TITLE The Bastich By Hart: Summer "Vacation" Part 13
PANEL 1 (BASTICH stares up from his workstation to the strip title with a dotted line extending from his glasses to the chapter number.) BASTICH: WHAT-!? Part 13!? We've never had a storyline drag on THIS long before! Well, enough of this noise. I'm outta here..!
PANEL 2 (BASTICH approaches MTN. DEWD and BAPPER.) BASTICH: Hey, Mtn. Dewd! Bapper! Pack your crap up. We're leaving this extended flashback in the DUST! BAPPER: It's about time! MTN. DEWD: No kidding...
PANEL 3 (Close up on BAPPER.) BAPPER: Hey, what about our jobs at Mothership? We've got some crippling college fees to worry about when we get back home..!
PANEL 4 (BASTICH raises his hand dismissively and MTN. DEWD responds.) BASTICH: Feh--! A few well-placed Perl scripts, and they'll never know we left! MTN. DEWD: Uh, 'Stich. I don't think Perl can do th--
PANEL 5 (BASTICH raises his fists in anger as MTN. DEWD backs down.) BASTICH: FOOL! There is nothing Perl cannot do! NOTHING! MTN. DEWD: Okay, okay..! Geez... never thought l'd actually say this, but lay off the Mtn. Dew for a while, man!
PANEL 6 (The three friends have their backs packed, prepared to leave when an off-panel voice interrupts their departure.) CAPTION: Later... BASTICH: Okay, scripts are running... MTN. DEWD: ...and we're all packed. BAPPER: Let's hit it! OFF-PANEL VOICE: NOT SO FAST! BASTICH: Oh пo... not YOU! CAPTION: To be continued...
CREDITS Bastich (c) 1998 Joshua Adam Hart
Commentary
We're on the home stretch for the original Bastich web strip, with only four more to go after this.
After a few months of hiatus, it was time to try and get back to the drawing board. I was obviously getting tired of this storyline, so it was time to sweep it all under the rug... again.
Ah, Perl... I shared Bastich's love for this language in the mid 1990s. It was my go-to whenever I needed a quick throwaway script to solve some computing problem. It was pretty great for loading a bunch of giant files and spitting out a report, which is something I constantly found myself needing to do.
Of course, I also used Perl for some not-so-throwaway projects that I probably shouldn't have. I left behind a host of tools that did exactly what they needed to do, but were nigh unmaintainable after I was gone. Perl is a powerful language but it lends itself to a cryptic coding style that's a lot easier to write than it is to read months later - even by the original author. You CAN write clean, readable code in Perl, but doing so kind of misses the point.
As Bapper once told me, if Java is "write-once-run-anywhere" then Perl is "write-once-unreadable" (forever).
For my throwaway scripts, Perl has since been mostly superseded by other more structured languages like Python and Ruby. As a result, my current professional output is less self-obfuscating than it used to be. But my dotfiles remember.
Meanwhile, everyone is wearing on-brand T-shirts.