Collections might have been inherited over generations. For some of them, the current owners may not have much interest in what they have and therefore not be aware of some rare copies.

In proper libraries, we probably have the author and title in a database somewhere but not the content. In private collections, all bets are off.

I would assume that almost any old library or private collection that includes old handwritten books has at least a couple of manuscripts that nobody has read in decades if not centuries.

I think that one baffles me the most. They make an argument for Shenmue and even if I don’t agree with it being on one, I can somewhat see why it’s on the list. But KCD2 has no right to be on the list at all. As they state themselves, the game is not even two months old. We can’t even remotely say what its long-term influence on the gaming industry will be. Though my money is on “none at all.”

HALF-LIFE 2

Okay that’s a little weird. We’re getting up into the real high-water heights here and I mean HL2 is good but…

This list is not about good, it’s about influential. HL2 was the first major game that based its core gameplay to its physics engine, the first to have HDR rendering and the game that Source engine was developed for. Without HL2, a lot of video games in the decade that followed it, would have looked a lot different.

SHENMUE

THE FUCK WHY WHAT

The article claims that Shenmue was the first to have a “living world” where characters follow their daily routines and so on. But yeah, I have my doubts if all the other games that do that were influenced by it.

We’re talking about the same event, aren’t we?

Big university in Germany that’s well-known for their computer science department. Started in 2008 and took way longer than planned. As stated in my other comment, being openly trans was rare when I started but had become more common by the time I got my degree, especially among new students who took the chance to make new friends who never knew their pre-outing personas.

So they see you as a human. Not a gay human.

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog

Oh, thanks for the heads up, I didn’t notice.

From personal experience, I would say it’s a phenomenon of the last… maybe 10 years, at least in Germany. When a friend of mine started university in about 2010, I think she was the only openly trans person out of 300 first semester computer science students. These days, when you go to a Chaos Computer Club event, it’s full of pride flags and queer people dressed in skirts, striped programmer socks and cat ear headbands. In the opposite direction, free tampons for trans-masc people in the men’s bathrooms are just… normal.

For a while this caused a bit of friction, not because people were outright anti-queer or anti-trans but because they felt it had gotten so extreme that their queer-welcoming computer nerd event had turned into a pride event which just happened to include a few people with laptops. Now everyone seems to get along though.

That being said, there have always been gender-nonconforming people in IT and gaming. As an arbitrary example, Rebecca Heineman is a trans-woman who taught herself how to pirate and reverse-engineer Atari 2600 games in the 1970s, became the first (US) national video gaming champion in 1980, worked at a gaming magazine, co-founded Interplay Productions, worked on many well-known games. It’s just that being trans wasn’t as accepted back then so a lot of them chose not to out themselves, which honestly can’t be good for one’s mental health.

As we said back in university: “If we have too few women in our field, we will make our own.”

After playing around for a bit, this really looks like the best option. I will wait until federation support gets added to the self-hosted version though.

Not sure about the best overall but one of my favorite karaoke memories is a metalhead friend of mine performing Weird Al - White & Nerdy.

Java is also an island

(Sorry, small inside joke for German-speaking Java programmers)

Surprisingly, yes, I do. Cucumber is a testing tool for ruby applications for a whole lot of programming languages.

Since my other post got a bit wordy and maybe not quite ELI5, let me simplify as much as I can, with the risk of leaving out details:

Say you have a red car but want a car that’s identical in every except that it’s black.

In a procedural programming language, you may just paint the car black. Or you may build an exact copy of the old car but in black. Or you may take half the parts from the red car and put them into a new black outer shell. Or anything in between. Any change to your old car, your driveway or anything else in the world is called a “side-effect”. The programming language doesn’t prevent you from writing something that has side effects that you didn’t actually want. It’s the programmers responsibility to make sure.

In a functional programming language, you’re not allowed to change the red car at all. You have to create a new black car. In fact, you can’t have any side effects. That way, you can’t accidentally damage your old car but makes some wishes harder to express.

At some point, using actual five year old words just makes communication harder rather than easier. OP mentioned that they’re at least somewhat familiar with some programming languages so I assumed they’d figure it out from context. But fine, I’ll change it.

And another example that shows off pattern matching:

Procedural:

int minimumElement(int[] array)
{
    if(array.size() == 0)
    {
        return 0;
    }

    int minimum = array[1];
    for(int i = 1; i < array.size(); i++)
    {
        if(array[i] < minimum)
        {
            minimum = array[i];
        }
    }
    return minimum;
}

Functional (still, no specific language, just an example of what it might look like):

int min(int a, int b) => a < b ? a : b;
int minimumElement(int[] array) =>
    array match {
        [firstElement, ...rest] => min(firstElement, getMinimumElement(rest));
        [singleElement] =>singleElement;
        [] => 0;
    }

If you made it through that lengthy post and are still interested, let me add that many concepts from functional programming languages have made it into other languages over the years. Personally, I’m most familiar with C# which has functions that take other functions as parameters, lambda functions (functions without a name that you can just define directly where you use them as a parameter), simple list operations that take functions (filtering, sorting, transforming…) and to some extent pattern matching. From what I’ve heard, newer versions of Java have much of that as well and some of those features have even made it into C++ (from C++11 onwards) though in that case the syntax is a bit hard to read.

Let me try getting this to ELI5 levels:

Most programming languages use a paradigm called “procedural programming” (or a variation of that, for example object-oriented programming). A series of instructions gets executed step by step to modify the program’s overall state. Imagine it like a cooking recipe. You have control structures like if, while and for that influence the order in which instructions are executed. There are functions (or methods in object-oriented programming) that let you reuse some instructions over and over but that’s not quite functional programming.

I’ll use a syntax similar to Java, C++ or C# as an example:

void squareAllElements(int[] array)
{
    for(int i = 0; i < array.size(); i++)
    {
        array[i] = array[i] * array[i];
    }
}

Functional programming is a bit more like what you know from maths class. There are still functions that take a list of inputs and produce an output but there is no state to be modified. Every operation must take everything it needs (apart from maybe constants) as parameters and produces new values/objects as an output. You say you know Java, so imagine that none of your methods returns void and every variable can only be assigned once. There are no loops but for example operations that let you separate the first element of a list from the rest or create a new list by applying an operation to all elements of an input. To make that easier, functions can take other functions as parameters.

So let me show the same example in a functional style. This is no specific language, just an example to help you imagine how it works.

int square(int x) => x * x;
int[] squareElements(int[] array) => applyToAllElements(array, square);

Functional programming has its own advantages and disadvantages. It can avoid a lot of bugs because functions can’t have unwanted side effects. They just take inputs, return outputs and leave the rest of the world (including their inputs) unmodified. On the other hand, that makes other use cases where you actually want to have some state that changes over time more difficult.

Hope that helps.

Edit: some cleanup and more precise explanations.