nah, one is never to old to learn stuff.

a tough, but hands-on start would be something like https://www.theodinproject.com/

it’s a free course for web development and their material is really good, so even if you don’t finish it you’ll aquire some good fundamentals about programming.

sadly that does not match your language preferences, but a lot of knowledge tends to transfer or helps to understand different approaches.

you could also try a course like Introduction to CS and Programming or other university/college courses. they are meant for people who start without programming experience.

sure, if the limitting factor in a case like this would be the speed of computation and not slow IO than implementing the computation in another language would be a viable way to increase performance.

It was written as part of my work.

check your contract, you might not own the code and your organization may have a process to determine how to license something.

to your other questions (IANAL)

1. prior work wont be licensed, meaning no one but the owner of the work is allowed to do anything with versions prior to the license
2. you don’t have to, but i can’t see a reason why you should not.
3. GPL might mean that other work depending on gpl licensed code has to be licensed in a gpl compatible way, depending on how exactly you depend on it and how you distribute your dependencies. MIT/BSD is easier here, if you don’t plan to license everything with the GPL anyway.

no, the solution is not to pay someone to have someone to blame if shit happens.

there are a bus load of people involved on the way from a git repo to actuall stuff running on a machine and everyone in that chain is responsible to have an eye on what stuff they are building/packaging/installing/running and if something seems off, it’s their responsibility to investigate and communicate with each other.

attacks like this will not be solved by paying someone to read source code, because the code in the repo might not be what is going to run on a machine or might look absolutely fine in a vacuum or will be altered by some other part in the chain. and even if you have dedicated code readers, you cant be sure that they are not compromised or that their findings will reach the people running/packaging/depending on the software.

i can’t see how paying someone would have changed anything in this scenario.

this seems to be a long running campaign to get someone into a position where they could introduce malicious code. the only thing different would have been that the bad actor would have been paid by someone.

this is not to say, that people working on foss should not be paid. if anything we need more people actively reviewing code and release artifacts even if they are not a contributor or maintainer of a piece of software.

And no, I have not tested it because I don’t know how I’m actually supposed to do that.

depends on what you backup and how.

if it’s just “dumb” files (videos, music pictures etc.), just retrieve them from your backups and check if you can open the files.

complex stuff? probably try to rebuild the complex stuff from a backup and check if it works as expected and is in the state you expect it to be in. how to do that really depends on the complex stuff.

i’d guess for most people it’s enough to make sure to backup dumb files and configurations, so they can rebuild their stuff rather than being able to restore a complex system in exactly the same state it was in before bad things happened.

when they released they were real time with pause, like the old baldurs gate games.

they added a turn based mode though, in a later patch.

maybe the pathfinder games by owlcat. the pathfinder rules they use are very very simmiliar to d&d 3.5 so, should feel familiar if you enjoyed neverwinter.

they are not super hardware hungry and run without a problem through proton/wine.