I am a little confused, it seems like you are proposing an interactive CUDA guide, but there is no mention of CUDA at all. Having spent a lot of time in graphics, I feel like better test environments for GPU programming will go a long way towards higher market adoption, it's a nightmare debugging sometimes
Shaders have there own stripped down C language to run on parts of the graphics pipeline as apposed to CUDA which is a much richer framework with a lot more control (and knowledge) of the GPU it's running on.
CUDA is an NVidia only GPU framework.
Shaders are used in conjunction with graphics frameworks like OpenGL, DirectX(?) and WebGL.
The interactive nature is great. Normally shaders are a just a big string or file that gets submitted to the graphics card driver to get compiled and run on the GPU.
I posted this, but I didn't create it. I came across it while learning OpenGL and thought it was an interesting way to learn more about how pixel (fragment) shaders worked.
That said, I definitely agree that an interactive CUDA guide would be useful! And although my experience with graphics programming is limited to the past few weeks I've certainly experienced some of what you mentioned with regards to debugging. One of the most frustrating things starting out with OpenGL was how forgetting a specific function call would cause nothing to render at all with no hint as to what was going wrong.
