What do you think of a Playground catalogue?

[mattpiz]

Lately, I’ve been introducing elm to people with no or very little dev experience. I’ve found that the new Playground that Evan put together with the new elm-lang.org/try are great for complete beginners (cf https://elm-lang.org/examples/picture).

At the end of the sessions though, I felt like it misses a way to save and share newcomers work. Those I’ve been helping had no dev environment on their machine so we ended up saving the code in word or sending it in an email.

Ellie could be an option, but currently I see two issues with it. (1) It often triggers the debug map! error, even on simple Playground programs. (2) Its interface is not exactly complete dev beginner friendly.

Also, I think that some people have great artistic talents, and having such a catalog would be both awesome to browse through and useful to beginners looking for examples.

Of course there is the issue of moderation. Maybe the catalog and the saving+sharing features could be separate, with an option when saving to add to public catalog, that would notify somehow catalog admins.

Anyway, that is just an idea. I’m also interested in other complete dev beginner stories. What have you tried? How did it work?

[ozyinc]

I remember in the past Typescript Playground would embed all the code written in it as a query parameter, which actually made it easier for me to assist others through TS Gitter when they had problems by showing examples, I was able to directly send the playground code by copy-pasting the URL (however, the URLs were huge).

I wonder whether it would be beneficial to do something like that for the Elm playground, too.

[illeatmyhat]

@ozyinc

however, the URLs were huge

That could be mediated using gzip or similar. Big URLs aren’t really a problem unless you’re communicating through Slack, or are using the editor for programs that are entirely too big for that environment.