I was initially put off by going straight to the repo's declared homepage (the Playground) and just seeing two empty text areas. The repo README isn't quite enough on its own - as you say, the interactive scripting experience is a huge part of the value here.
I strongly recommend doing what you can to get visitors to that experience as directly as possible. For example: pre-filling the Playground with a short, good example (e.g. the JSON-to-table one). Many people won't get as far as pasting that into the empty Playground. Once I tried it, everything made considerably more sense to me. (I'm not a regular FP coder; I've done some Elm, some Miranda in college, that's it.)
There are plenty of other things you can do (embed a couple of GIFs in the README; offer a choice of examples in the Playground) but I'd focus on (a) getting people to the Playground (b) prefilling the Playground with an example (c) add a few explanatory comments to the example.
Again, this looks great, and I'm eager to use it. Congrats!
That's a great idea - I will look into that. Perhaps even a little menu with a few different examples. One challenge is that the Playground is sandboxed, so the more interesting examples involving eg. SSH or scraping are mostly off limits.
Thanks for the feedback, and be sure to leave an experience report if you do try it! TopShell is very young, and its future evolution will be guided by concrete use cases.
I was initially put off by going straight to the repo's declared homepage (the Playground) and just seeing two empty text areas. The repo README isn't quite enough on its own - as you say, the interactive scripting experience is a huge part of the value here.
I strongly recommend doing what you can to get visitors to that experience as directly as possible. For example: pre-filling the Playground with a short, good example (e.g. the JSON-to-table one). Many people won't get as far as pasting that into the empty Playground. Once I tried it, everything made considerably more sense to me. (I'm not a regular FP coder; I've done some Elm, some Miranda in college, that's it.)
There are plenty of other things you can do (embed a couple of GIFs in the README; offer a choice of examples in the Playground) but I'd focus on (a) getting people to the Playground (b) prefilling the Playground with an example (c) add a few explanatory comments to the example.
Again, this looks great, and I'm eager to use it. Congrats!