I remember being forced to learn this in university.
I started CS from the POV of someone with several commercial projects under the belt and at the time being fluent already in five or six different programming languages. But the university where I started had had an issue - they had been way to theoretical (imagine people writing their CS thesis on a mechanical typewriter, and professors telling us that one does not need computer access for mastering CS!). So they had been more or less forced to include at least a bit of real world stuff into their blackboard and paper world. Which resulted in a no-excuse-mandatory beginners course in Turbo Pascal in the first year and Turbo Prolog in the second.
And I was not alone. It was painful. They showed a programming task to be done on the overhead projector, and about 90% of us could have just typed down the answer without thinking and be done with the weekly assignment in five minutes. Nope. Instead, we had to follow (and join) a lengthy, boring, and worthless discussion about the very basics of programming, before we were allowed to work on it. And woe to us if we did not follow the precise path that we had been “taught” in that lesson, even if it was done in a way that no normal programmer would ever implement it.
If they had given us all the assignments for the semester in one go, we would probably had finished them in one afternoon, including documentation and time to spare.
At least with Turbo Prolog we learned something new. First and foremost that there are strong reasons that nobody uses Prolog for serious programming.
I didn’t say that I agree, I just pointed out that there are way more prominent ways this sexualisation is done.
I also don’t agree with the headline of the article that this kind of pictures will somehow “flood” the internet. It might flood their hidden nieches for being cheap and plentiful, but I don’t think they will pop up increasingly in any normal users everyday browsing activities.
We did Prolog in university - actually it was one of the two languages we had to learn in CS, the other one being Pascal.
I always considered Prolog a pain in the ass and unsuitable for anything bigger than a piece of homework due to the “we don’t do loops, we have tail recursion” making the code unnecessary complex and hard to read. On a list of Write-Only languages I’d rate it a few steps below Perl.
If I would complain about any new language or environment I’d be dropped in, I’d probably in the loony bin by now.
Tell the team leader that you don’t know the language but are willing to learn, read the existing code which will give you a feel for the language, the project, and the local programming style, all in one go, and you should be fine. Imagine the backend was written in PL/I, Prolog, or LISP instead of just another ALGOL dialect ;-)
“This incident demonstrates the evolving challenges of cybersecurity in the face of sophisticated attacks. We continue to work directly with government agencies on this issue, and maintain our commitment to continue sharing information at Microsoft Threat Intelligence blog."
Translation: Fixing bugs cost way to much more money than just leaving them in, so in order to save the profits, we just wait them out. If the shit hits the fan, we can still start looking into the issue and maybe get some PR coverage to distract the public.
But we still happily support government agencies to exploit the barndoor-sized holes in our software for whatever nefarious reasons they have because they pay us for that.
GNU Image Manipulation Program (or Project)