The Best of Verity Stob

It's hard to believe now, but there was a time when writing jokes about multi-dispatch inheritance in dynamically typed languages simply wasn't the glamorous, highly paid profession that it is today. Before Slashdot, before User Friendly and the Joy of Tech, before Futurama, before Old Man Murray, before Dilbert, and before "1001 Surefire Gags about C++ That Will Wow Your Klingon Wedding Guests," funny for geeks was a criminally underserved market sector. Biro-drawn cartoon strips were the typical fare, all called something like Just Byting Around or Giga-giggles These would run for a few months in Practical Computing or PC Handholder or some such ma- zine. After recycling gags revolving around hard drives and floppy disk entendres, these wretched specimens died for lack of inspiration and, I would hope, some vestigial sense of shame. And then there was, thank God, Verity Stob. I remember the first time I read the Stob column. It was 1988, and I was hiding in a fluorescent-lit dungeon in the heart of my university, strumming futilely through the lower-rent academic journals and controlled-circulation tech mags. The first few lines--some throwaway comment about Lisp, I think-- had my snorts echoing across the library.