FWIW: when I ported the DomTerm terminal emulator (see separate response below) to WSL, it went surprisingly smoothly. The domterm command is a split front-end/back-end application: The back-end is a WSL command-line program written in C. It handles argument parsing, ptys, forking, http and wesocket serving, daemoniation, unix-domain sockets, and more Linux idioms. Very little had to be changed for WSL - mainly changing some file paths. The front-end handles the UI and is a Windows application: You can either use your regular Windows desktop browser (Firefox and Chrome both work), or you can use an Electron wrapper, which is somewhat nicer. (The Electron wrapper is basically a small amount of JavaScript code that requires an Electron binary that you can download from GitHub.)

windows has a terrible terminal emulator

Can I suggest you check out DomTerm? It has the functionality of gnome-terminal (and then some) but does not require an X-server. Instead, it uses Electron, which (in my biased opinion) makes for a very nice interface. This article focuses on DomTerm on WSL. The release page includes pre-compiled WSL binaries.

In the old days I used old-fashioned tuner cards, but for years I've been using an external HdHomeRun network tuner. Just put one of these little boxes where convenient, connect antenna cable, and ethernet (WiFi is also an option). This means you can run MythTV on almost any PC, such as an discarded laptop, as long as it has HDMI output and sufficient storage (optionally USB).

The article is misleading in suggesting that driving from Kristiansand to Trondheim currently takes about 20 hours. It does that if you roughly follow the coastline. However, there is already a much faster route going through Oslo.

Where floating tunnels may make sense is for shorter trips - for example Bergen to Ålesund.

Iceland is not part of Europe. I... there is no geographic or political definition that can put Iceland within Europe.

Wrong. Iceland is generally considered part of Europe

Thanks. Kawa has what one might call "optimistic typing": The compiler calculates the type of an expression, and compares it with the type required by context. It only complains if this intsection is empty. In contrast, in traditional strict typing the compiler requires that expression type be a sub-type of the required type (unless there is an explicit cast). I've thought about adding an option to Kawa (it wouldn't be the default) to implement strict (sub-type) typing. However, that would require various changes and some thought to make palatable.

Groovy has optional static types, while Scheme does not out of the box.

However, Kawa does have optional static typing. That, plus careful language design, plus a smart compiler, means that Kawa code run very faster - much faster than Groovy or Clojure or JRuby or ...

"Does this bring anything to the table that Groovy doesn't?"

Yes. (I suggest reading the LWN article linked in the submission - it's fairly short.)

Ask Rich Hickey that: Kawa (1996) is 11 years older than Clojure (2007).

The linked LWN article meantions some reasons: Among them that Kawa is much faster than closure (both execution speed and start-up speed). Plus some might like that Kawa is mostly-compatible with a pre-existing independently-specified language.

"Something that I find strange is how fast kawa seems to be [even] in the repl." Note that Kawa does a full compilation (to bytecode), with all the optimizations, even in the repl. (Of course it only optimized one line/command at a time in that case.) The downside is that Kawa is a little fragile if you redefine things in the repl; hence I advise using the --no-inline option for the repl. It's on the list of things to work on when we get a chance.

Neither Java or Kawa are "traditional compiled language" in the same sense as C or C++. However, Java as a language (rather than as an implementation technology) is much closer in style to C++ than (say) Python or Ruby. Java has lexical scoping, static name resolution, ahead-of-time compilation (albeit to bytecode), does lots of compile-time error checking. In the current environment, Java (and Scala) are considered closer to "traditional compiled language" than languages like Python or Ruby, which are considered "scripting languages". Of course there is no hard distinction between the two kinds (except marketing) - and Kawa aims at the strengths of both kinds.

You're off two decades: Scheme is from 1975.

The Kawa 0.1 interpreter from 1996 was written by Alex Milowski, who is indeed Polish-American.

I took it over in 1996, and re-wrote it as a compiler. At this point, I doubt any of Alex's code still exists. I'm Norwegian-American, and Kawa means nothing in Norwegian. Still, I saw no reason to change the name.