x/playground: some popup examples aren't worth including

[rogpeppe]

The new version of the Go playground includes the following examples:

• Hello, World!
• Conway's Game of Life
• Fibonacci Closure
• Peano Integers
• Concurrent Pi
• Concurrent Prime Sieve
• Peg Solitaire Solver
• Tree Comparison
• Clear Screen
• HTTP Server
• Display Image
• Multiple Files
• Sleep
• Test Function
• Generic min

Some of these are important and useful demonstrations of the playground's capabilities, and useful building blocks for people to use as a starting point for their own examples. In that category, I'd include these:

• Hello, World! - gotta start somewhere
• Clear Screen - a playground-specific capability
• HTTP Server - showing that it's OK to run a network-based program
• Display Image - another playground-specific capability
• Multiple Files - demonstrates the txtar format and local modules
• Sleep - showing it's OK to sleep
• Test Function - we can define test functions too
• Generic min - generics available here!

I believe the other examples are less useful - they add clutter to the useful examples, and some of them demonstrate practices that are theoretically interesting but probably not a good idea in practice. In that latter category I'd include the following:

• Fibonacci Closure
• Peano Integers
• Concurrent Pi
• Concurrent Prime Sieve
• Tree Comparison

While the above are all interesting, I don't believe they deserve the privileged place in the playground that they currently occupy. For example, it's common for newcomers to Go to overuse channels in situations that they're not really suited for, and using them in examples like "Concurrent Pi", "Concurrent Prime Sieve" and "Tree Comparison" probably won't help in that regard.

I'd suggest that we restrict the examples in the playground to those that demonstrate playground-specific capabilities or act usefully as building blocks for examples that people might build. In other words, let's remove the above set of examples from the pop-up, please 😃 .

As an alternative, maybe include a link to a page showing other examples with playground links, which would allow each link to be framed by some explanation and could scale to include many more possible examples.

[robpike]

It would be a shame to hide some of these, which are solutions that look different and interesting in Go. Perhaps all that's needed is a comment, especially on some of the ones that are more ideas than practice.

[seankhliao]

Or maybe order them in the dropdown list with the ones demonstrating functionality coming first?