2012-06-28
Explanation
The comic begins as an educational explainer about "while loops" in computer programming. It shows a standard flowchart diagram of how a while loop works: a condition is checked, and if true, a statement executes before looping back to re-check the condition. The example code uses a variable called "loneliness" that starts at 1 and prints "AAAAAAH!" while loneliness is less than 14, incrementing each time -- already a darkly humorous choice of variable name for what should be a dry programming tutorial.
The punchline comes in the final panel, which declares that while loops are "also a good description of a lot of programmers." A man holding flowers asks "Do you love me now?" and is told "I told you, NO!" to which he responds "I'll be back tomorrow." This maps the while loop concept onto the stereotype of the socially awkward, romantically persistent programmer who keeps repeating the same failed approach as long as some internal condition remains true (i.e., they still have a crush). The humor works on two levels: it's a legitimate computer science lesson, and it's a self-deprecating joke about programmer culture and the inability to take "no" for an answer being treated as a kind of buggy human algorithm stuck in an infinite loop.