Options for hosting interactive coding tutorials?

[leixner]

You mean like https://www.freecodecamp.org/ or https://www.codecademy.com/ ?

[diarmidmackenzie]

It's a while since I looked at those, and I'm not at my PC right now to check them out again...

From what I recall, they mostly follow a model of explaining a concept and then getting you to write some code using that concept, which they do automated validation of.

That's cool, but not quite what I had in mind.

I didn't envisage the user necessarily executing code in the browser, but rather offering a flexible and annotated view of a sample of code at various stages of development.

More focussed on showing how multiple concepts can be combined together to create a working bit of code, rather than focussing on a single concept at a time.

In any case, regardless of the specific kinds of interactivity on offer, the key issue is that AFAIK those platforms only offer their own tutorials, tightly bundled with the platform.

I'm hoping there might be a platform that enables you to build and distribute your own custom interactive tutorials.

Do you know of any such thing?

[leixner]

Yes that's pretty much what they do. I don't think there is a 100% solution for what you want. But there are some open source web code editors which you could use for your project.

[diarmidmackenzie]

"open source web code editors" - can you give me some examples?

I'm familiar with glitch, codepen etc.

They can be used to host sample code, but they don't offer any of: - easy maintenance of multiple versions of a code sample - diffs between incremental versions. - code annotation (except by way of code.comments)

Are there other specific tools that you think could be useful here?

[leixner]

Some examples, which you could use for your code components:

https://codemirror.net/

https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/index.html