Not equivalent, but arguably more useful for manual authoring: Emmet [0] was all the range a while back, and I still use it to write HTML. It comes naturally if you're used to writing CSS-like selectors, and mostly gets out of the way.
DSL-wise, I've rather enjoyed Clojure's Hiccup [1].
It might be worth pointing out that this presentation comes with speaker notes (keyboard shortcut: S, or click on the gear icon at the bottom and find the link). They contain much more content (and context) than the slides alone.
Yes, it will run on your system X11 obeying your .Xresources. I have never tried using update-alternatives to replace the system-wide GCC (or any piece of software for that matter).
You can always use something like the Nix package manager[1] to install Firefox, Git, and Emacs, and leave the rest to Ubuntu. Save for Firefox, which I install from a tarball and use auto-update, I have been doing that with Debian stable on my laptop, and it works well.
I'd recommend going with the language you're most likely to use extensively - since you're sitting next to a person speaking French, I'd say that might be a good option. It's too easy to underestimate the importance of conversational practice while learning a language.
There's a vibrant meetup scene (well-covered by meetup.com), and WebCamp Zagreb (https://2016.webcampzg.org/) is the community conference that tries to gather different meetups & communities once a year.
Companies from abroad tend to open development offices here to exploit the cheaper workforce, especially since Croatia has joined the EU. There's also a number of local companies that are constantly hiring, resulting in a solid amount of hiring opportunities even for the part of the crowd that's a bit pickier.
People are leaving Croatia in general, though, and the tech community isn't immune to that. Lots of people moved to other EU countries, and although that's not unexpected at all, I believe it's left a dent within all of the above.
They don't really work at the type system level, but Code Contracts (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/dd491992), though quite verbose, may be used to achieve that to a certain degree. The integration with Visual Studio is decent and the documentation is great, but they are designed to provide a whole design-by-contract framework which may be an overkill.
(Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, but was closely present during a long lasting treatment of acute myeloid leukemia with no suitable donor in sight.)
To help folks suffering from leukemia in general, join your local bone marrow registry. Transplants can vastly improve the patient's chances of survival, and the typization process you need to go through to join is painless and harmless. But, more importantly: if they find you a match, do not back down. I've heard of cases where the potential donors got scared and gave up upon receiving the phone call.
There are two types of transplants used in treatments: stem cell and bone marrow transplants.
Stem cell transplants are relatively painless -- it's not entirely unlike dialysis for one's blood. Bone marrow transplants are far less trivial, requiring general anesthesia and a couple of days in the hospital. They are are, from what I could gather, far less common and more dangerous.
Also: when / if you join, try to talk all your friends into joining as well. :)
Depending on your text editor of choice, vimwiki (https://code.google.com/p/vimwiki/) could be what you're looking for. It stores all data in plain text files which can easily be versioned in your VCS of choice and/or stored in a Dropbox folder. I've been using it for a while now, works like a charm.
Last time I checked, you could only see the names of your friends in Facebook's profile export archive -- there were no metadata whatsoever (e.g. IDs or profile links). I don't think names themselves are enough to port your social graph.
There is TuxMobil (http://tuxmobil.org/), which is trying to be a repository of installation & configuration guides for various mobile devices. It was very useful to me in the past, but it doesn't seem to be up-to-date anymore.
I really like the simplicity and the choice of language. I think a comments / discussion section would be useful, for people to ask questions, talk about the ways to make the articles even better and perhaps translate the code to other languages.
All in all - I hope you keep up the good work, solid tutorials like these make it more compelling to keep up with the basics and learn new things from the "CS 101" department.
DSL-wise, I've rather enjoyed Clojure's Hiccup [1].
[0] https://emmet.io/
[1] https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup