[HN Gopher] Why We're Building Observable
___________________________________________________________________
Why We're Building Observable
Author : petulla
Score : 196 points
Date : 2020-11-20 15:34 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (observablehq.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (observablehq.com)
| silentsea90 wrote:
| Extremely dumb question: how is this different from tableau
| and/or jupyter notebooks? I don't use visualizations and don't
| understand this space :)
| tracyhenry wrote:
| Tableau offers templated visualizations. You generally do not
| need to program to create stuff. Observable is a notebook
| environment where you can write JS (mostly) to create and tweak
| _highly customized_ visualizations. It 's similar to Jupyter on
| a very high level (they all have reactive cells for example),
| but for JS and visualizations.
| silentsea90 wrote:
| That makes sense! Thank you!
|
| Some more questions: 1) Assuming the bulk of folks use
| jupyter notebooks for analysis, why not integrate with
| jupyter or use d3.js in jupyter directly? I assume there
| would be a learning curve for data manipulation on js where
| analysts/scientists would prefer python 2) Assuming that this
| isn't even meant for the jupyter audience, who is it meant
| for within a company?
| tracyhenry wrote:
| I mean this is my question as well: how are they making
| money? As of right now Observable seems like a mix of use
| cases like Medium-like explanation articles, vis
| debugging/authoring and interactive journalism that don't
| seem to generate much money (ofc I can be wrong).
|
| I totally agree with you that the DS community is much much
| larger than the vis community. With the new funding round I
| think they should start doing something with DS.
| carls wrote:
| I'm a big fan of Observable, having used it to prototype and
| learn a number of different visualizations. Note that you don't
| just have to use D3, but can use other visualization libraries as
| well (i.e. Vega-Lite, Highcharts).
|
| I also want to shout out Mike Bostock, one of the company
| founders (and creator of D3). I emailed him randomly to ask for
| some help with a d3 package and he replied the next morning.
|
| Busy creators who nevertheless still make themselves available to
| engaging with the community always impress me!
| jeffbee wrote:
| Bostock jumps into random Twitter threads to answer questions
| from Observable users. He's really helpful and generous.
| breck wrote:
| He responded to me too, almost a decade ago when I was first
| getting into the field and looking for mentors. He had some
| great tips too (basically which was to __not __do what I was
| doing privately emailing devs asking for mentorship and instead
| get involved with the public open communities on via GitHub,
| Stackoverflow, sharing demos, etc). Obvious advice in
| hindsight, but took me a while to internalize that.
| [deleted]
| anentropic wrote:
| Skimming the docs... the tutorials are really nicely done but
| it's hard to find a clear description of what exactly is
| possible.
|
| Can you install libraries (from npm?)
|
| Can you build and share custom components, not just notebooks?
|
| Can you connect to a web server?
| tracyhenry wrote:
| You can install npm libraries. You can connect to DBMS servers
| (not sure about arbitrary web servers). I believe they offer
| iframes to facilitate embedding but not frontend components.
|
| Interactive vis is not very well integrated with the frontend
| ecosystem IMHO. Integrating a very interactive D3 vis with
| React, for example, can be painful.
| SamBam wrote:
| I'm a little confused about what the announcement is. Are they
| moving out of beta?
| carls wrote:
| It's a bit buried, but if you click through the link about how
| today is a big day for Observable, you'll notice it links to an
| article announcing that they raised their Series A today:
| $10.5M from Sequoia and Acrew.
| ParadiseEclipse wrote:
| I wonder why it's buried... the comments on this thread don't
| seem to be on a single topic, so it looks like most people
| have struggled to find the point too
| tlarkworthy wrote:
| I am a huge fan of Observable and I think it has massive
| potential beyond visualizations. To me it's the holy grail of a
| development environment, there is no separation between
| development and output. There is no toolchain separating source
| and binary, infact, the binary is _partially_ recomputed on
| changes.
|
| On top, it is forkable for others to build upon. It support
| comments, its reactive. When I explain it to people I say its
| like a combination excel + vscode + google docs + github. There
| is nothing like it!
|
| I been trying to see how far I can push it for non- visualization
| software. Turns out... pretty far....
|
| Firebase + Stripe =>
| https://observablehq.com/embed/@tomlarkworthy/saas-tutorial
|
| On Demand Minecraft Servers =>
| https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/minecraft-servers
|
| Zero deploy serverless cells =>
| https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/serverside-cells
|
| With serverless cells I can serve HTTP endpoints from a notebook!
| E.g. custom HTML like:
|
| https://serversidecells-ibyw6dtm4q-ey.a.run.app/notebooks/@t...
| is generated from a notebook!
|
| I am so productive in Observable because there is no context
| switch between development, using the product and debugging, it's
| all just one thing. Amazing, utterly amazing. I hope the
| Observable team can accommodate my use cases, as its clearly not
| what they had in mind.
| xipho wrote:
| Observable is fantastic, but as others have hinted at, IMO, I
| think it's trying to lock you in. I want the raw JS, in one
| click, so that I can build out a visualization locally, just
| hacking on HTML/JS. Steps to doing this are highly obfuscated
| when they could be a single button.
|
| Overall you can see its evolution from prior sites- someone spent
| a huge amount of time demonstrating cool visualizations, then
| tried to make it all "proprietary". Nothing wrong with that, but
| why not make people addicted to the service by giving them the
| raw drug, rather than making them hate you for dancing through
| hoops?
|
| Again- huge fan of access to many cool visualizations that have
| greatly improved what I can express visually for presentations
| etc., but very unhappy that I can't do this so much easier for my
| particular workflow. I'd love to be shown otherwise, but I've
| also spent a lot of time looking for answers, reading forum
| responses, etc., and they seem to all reflect wanting you to go
| through them, not along for the ride with them.
| mistidoi wrote:
| I kind of thought that too, but somewhere around the start of
| the pandemic, I was able to quickly develop an interactive
| dataviz on Observable
| (https://observablehq.com/@mistidoi/coronavirus-tests-
| positiv...) and drop it into a blog post trivially
| (https://relevant.healthcare/blog/2020-04-02-covid-state-
| visu...). Beyond the work on the viz itself, it took something
| like 15 minutes to get it into the blog post, and it's more or
| less seamless.
|
| Confession though, I might have been powered by Mike Bostock
| fanboy juice. d3 is part of what made me fall in love with
| programming.
| carls wrote:
| Can you share how you were able to embed the notebook into
| your blog post?
| protoduction wrote:
| I agree that Observable is fantastic, but also wish it was more
| open.
|
| I'm building something similar called Starboard Notebook[0]
| that has a different set of trade-offs. It ends up being
| something in between Jupyter and Observable:
|
| * One of the goals is to build Jupyter how it would have been
| if it was designed for the web (only).
|
| * It's open source [1], plays nice with git (the format is
| plaintext), and supports local viewing & editing [2]
|
| * Because of that you can host it yourself, put it on your blog
| / github pages, anywhere.
|
| * There is little magic, it actually is just Javascript at it's
| base. This means you can use standard browser APIs and HTML,
| and when you are ready to "graduate" the notebook
| implementation that should be straightforward. In my eyes
| notebooks are only for the first 20% of the work that does 80%
| of the job for small applications/experimentation (which is
| often where it ends anyway).
|
| * You can "build the ship as you sail": you can load new cell
| types dynamically at runtime. This is also how Python is
| supported (through WebAssembly).
|
| * You can have interop with Python and Javascript which is
| really powerful. Example: Create a drag an drop form using
| HTML+JS, then process the dropped CSV file using Pandas and
| visualize using matplotlib.
|
| [0]: https://starboard.gg [1]:
| https://github.com/gzuidhof/starboard-notebook [2]:
| https://github.com/gzuidhof/starboard-cli
| Jugurtha wrote:
| Playing with this a bit. It appears I can't use `pip` with
| `pyodide` and have to use `micropip` with:
| micropip.install('torch')
|
| Which fails with a message: Couldn't find a
| pure Python 3 wheel for 'torch'
|
| Would you agree that this is a substitute for "pencil and
| paper" to express ideas around data?
| RobinL wrote:
| I don't think that's entirely fair.
|
| For instance, I host content on my personal website [0] that is
| written in using Observable, and in fact the site provides
| guides to allow anyone to export content[1] and embed elsewhere
| online.
|
| My content can be entirely under my control if I save my
| libraries out of the Observable API as a tarball[2].
|
| I genuinely think the differences between Observable and 'pure'
| javascript are driven by the vision for a more powerful way of
| using javascript for rapid prototyping, rather than any attempt
| to make it proprietary. I think these ideas are revolutionary
| and Observable is one of my favourite working environments as a
| data scientist.
|
| I also think that Mike Bostock has shown good faith, and
| dedication to the open source community through decades of
| work, which he's always given away for free.
|
| With all that said, if ObservableHQ and its API were to
| disappear overnight, the lack of an editing environment would
| make it difficult to update existing content and so I think
| there is space for a offline version of the editor. As far as I
| understand it, nothing's stopping a third party building this.
|
| [0]https://www.robinlinacre.com/energy-usage/
| [1]https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/downloading-and-
| embed...
| [2]https://github.com/RobinL/robinl.github.io/tree/dev/tgz
| xipho wrote:
| Thanks for the links, I completely concur with the goodness
| of everything you've raised.
|
| To clarify where I'm coming from, my use-case is (fully)
| offline. I want to mock the visualization in the service then
| get the raw, static JS offline to be used as a template. I'll
| write a Ruby wrapper around the data I'm exploring and
| gradually parameterize the template as I better understand
| it, and what my data looks like in it. I don't want to dance
| with details of the JS, I want to dance with details of the
| data and parameters, so get me out of requiring online hooks
| ASAP. I _know_ this is possible because prior versions of
| Observable let you do exactly what I want, but now I get some
| super friendly /not friendly interfaces that obfuscates what
| I'm familiar with.
|
| As a separate issue not fully related- Ultimately my goal is
| a static visualization for scientific publications or
| presentations (I can export SVG from Observable, so my prior
| arguments doesn't hold here). Science has a very long shelf-
| life, in my field we routinely reference papers and their
| figures 200+ years old. While I absolutely love the idea of
| "living publications" I also fear life that depends on
| other's services. If the big people can't place nice
| (coughing in your direction Google services gone dark, I can
| think of various examples that have screwed over scientists),
| then you can see my caution in adopting Observable's all-in-
| dynamic approach.
| golemiprague wrote:
| I might be deficient in some way but I just feel a bit dumbstruck
| with a lot of the visualisations and I can't make sense of them.
| Would rather just read a table with simple numbers. Except from
| very simple graphs everything else looks to me like a cognitive
| overload which I can't decipher.
| kowlo wrote:
| You can't self-host with Observable. For many, that means it's
| not a feasible replacement or improvement over an existing
| literate programming environment.
|
| It is a bit silly to downvote this for not being true, when it is
| factual.
| j-pb wrote:
| Not true.
|
| The Observable runtime is open source, and trivial to integrate
| into your existing react/whatever webapp.
|
| There is also a vscode plugin that allows for live editing and
| rendering. It doesn't give you the ObservableHQ interface, but
| tbh I like working with files more. It also allows me to git
| everything.
|
| https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GordonSm...
| ParadiseEclipse wrote:
| It sounds like you confirmed that it can't be self-hosted -
| are you sure about it not being true?
| j-pb wrote:
| Hosting the notebook and hosting the development
| environment are two different things.
|
| It's like saying git (observable) can't be self hosted
| because github (observablehq) is not open source.
| kowlo wrote:
| Just to jump in and say my comment that you said wasn't
| true was "... improvement over an existing literate
| programming environment.".
| j-pb wrote:
| I don't argue that you might find a different notebook
| environment more suitable. That's totally up to taste,
| preferences, and silly do argue about.
|
| But observable (the reactive notebook technology) can do
| everything a jupyter notebook can do, you just need to
| write a bit of communication code to hook up a websocket.
| (For me sandboxing the ui is a feature not a bug.)
|
| And you can also self host it on a machine of your
| choice, and edit it locally.
|
| We do that internally for all our dashboards.
| kowlo wrote:
| It is true.
|
| You can't self-host the same way you can self-host the
| Jupyter Notebook or Jupyter Lab environment.
|
| Or has that changed? Can I work on something offline without
| communicating with their servers?
| j-pb wrote:
| Check the link provided. It's just running inside of
| vscode, with no communication to their servers whatsoever.
| kowlo wrote:
| I did, it's not the same literate programming environment
| like I said. Are we misunderstanding each other?
| j-pb wrote:
| "You can't self-host with Observable."
|
| You can self host observble, but you can't self host
| observablehq.
|
| Literate programming just means the combination of code
| and documentation/visualisation.
|
| Observablehq provides a nice inline code editor, but
| that's incidental to what observable is.
|
| Git can also be used with a GUI but that GUI is not
| essential to what git is.
|
| Simularly observable notebooks can just as well be
| created without the GUI, in a quite convenient way.
| kowlo wrote:
| I can see the ambiguity in what you've quoted, but it's
| clarified in the sentence that immediately follows it. It
| was referring to the "literate programming environment".
| mrkwse wrote:
| I really like Observable a lot, and have made a couple of brief,
| messy visualisations with it (messy in terms of code at least).
|
| I hope at some point they can offer some sort of offline support.
| The focus on ease of sharing is great, and the volume and breadth
| of content has really helped me to get more proficient with d3.
| The inability to open and edit notebooks offline/locally is a
| real inconvenience, however.
|
| I have a small personal site on Netlify (with Next.js) and going
| forward I'm looking at hosting the sort of stuff I have on
| Observable there, simply as it's easier to work to when offline.
| The quality of the community and resources is a really valuable
| thing, but the need to be online is a real drawback at times.
| kowlo wrote:
| Indeed having the environment offline would be great. But this
| doesn't seem to fit their model for profit.
| ontouchstart wrote:
| You can host __production __notebooks offline /locally or on
| your own SSG/CDN.
|
| Here is a project that we built last year (by its nature, it
| had a limited shelf life so it made no sense to have long term
| cloud support.)
|
| https://spike150.mocanyc.org/
|
| If you inspect the source in the browser, you will see that the
| notebooks are hosted on the same server.
|
| P.S. If you want online interactive notebook on your own site,
| I guess that is their business model either as a viral sharing
| of free notebooks or paid private team sharing. (I was on a
| team plan during the development of the project. But once the
| project is done, there is no need for us to continue on team
| plan and be interactive. I am glad that they offer support of
| offline production notebook.)
|
| P.P.S. If Observable Team is listening, here is a business idea
| for them: observable playground as a service. It would be less
| a technical challenge than a business development challenge.
| rgovostes wrote:
| Coincidentally, I tinkered with my first Observable notebook last
| night (https://observablehq.com/@rzg/prosthaphaeresis -- don't
| judge too harshly).
|
| One of the improvements on the computational notebook concept is
| that it seems to compute a data flow graph so it knows what cells
| to update when the data changes, without you needing to re-run
| cells in a particular sequence. The cells can also be out of
| order.
|
| The editor interface is pretty slick, and I wish it were open
| source so I could use it in other projects.
|
| (Mike Bostock, one of the founders, is also the creator of D3.js
| and the information visualization gallery bl.ocks.org. Here's my
| favorite: https://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/31bd072e50eaf550d79e)
| breck wrote:
| Wow, never heard of Prosthaphaeresis before. So cool! Really
| enjoyed playing with your notebook. So concise and clear.
| thanks!
| mrkwse wrote:
| The data flow is really well implemented with Observable. The
| fact you don't need to go through and repeat the execution of a
| number of downstream cells when you make a change is really
| useful.
|
| Another great advantage they have is the data map on the right-
| hand margin. It's a good way of seeing how complex a notebook
| is getting as well as being a really efficient way of
| navigating through the data flow.
| billconan wrote:
| An issue of visualization on the web I don't know how to solve is
| how to load large data.
| RobinL wrote:
| Very much depends on how large you're talking, but check out
| Apache Arrow:
| https://observablehq.com/@theneuralbit/introduction-to-apach...
| https://observablehq.com/@uwdata/arquero-and-apache-arrow
| catacombs wrote:
| That depends on the job. Is the data constantly updating?
| tracyhenry wrote:
| We are building a data vis tool
| (https://github.com/tracyhenry/kyrix) to solve this exact
| problem many web vis tools have.
|
| The idea is not surprising: using database indexes and a
| backend to send the frontend necessary data to render _on
| demand_. DB and the backend are containerized so the
| installation, data loading and authoring are all one command.
|
| For creators, we offer D3 and JSON-based declarative primitives
| that enable creation of pan/zoom like visualizations very
| easily (e.g. 10s of lines of JSON for a 15-zoom-level vis). You
| can check out an interactive demo here, which visualizes 1.88
| million wildfires: http://wildfire.kyrixdemo.live/
|
| Since big data vis is very use case dependent, I'd like to
| reference two other tools that might be useful:
|
| Falcon: https://github.com/uwdata/falcon NanoCubes:
| https://nanocubes.net/
|
| Disclaimer: I'm still in academia so I'm apparently biased
| towards academic works. But fortunately they are all open
| source.
| breck wrote:
| I saw you mention Falcon and NanoCubes so had to check our
| kyrix. I think this is a really important space. I used to
| assume Palantir had solved this but now that they're public
| it seems to be more of a smoke and mirrors startup.
|
| 3 questions:
|
| 1. Why isn't there a demo I can just click and visit?
|
| 2. Why not TypeScript? (I think this would be a worthy short
| term and long term investment --for this project and beyond--
| to make the upgrade)
|
| 3. Why Docker? (This one I'm probably wrong about and am just
| a curmudgeonly old gray beard). Every time I see Docker I say
| "nope". I get it's use for massive clusters, but for running
| on one machine I dislike it (at that point I'd prefer just to
| run an image on a cloud VM).
| tracyhenry wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback!
|
| 1. In the original comment there is a link to a demo
| created by Kyrix: http://wildfire.kyrixdemo.live/ Are you
| looking for a different type of demo?
|
| 2. Honest answer: we are very understaffed academics who
| also need to write papers and theses. We want to convert to
| TS, that is just one item on the wish list.
|
| 3. We want everyone to be able to spin up a Kyrix app _on
| their laptop_ using 3 CLI commands (you can try,
| instructions are in the README). With a backend and a
| database comes the cost of complex installation. Docker
| helps make everyone 's dev environment consistent so it's
| easier to troubleshoot.
| breck wrote:
| 1. Ah! Sorry I missed that and went to the GitHub. Might
| be helpful to also add that link to the "website" field
| of the GitHub?
|
| 2. I get it. I never had the "pleasure" of being an
| academic, but got the chance to be a software engineer
| working alongside grad students for a couple of years and
| it felt like I imagine what taking a tour of a sweatshop
| factory floor would be like. (a huge exaggeration, but I
| saw a lot of low pay and lots of time on pdfs and not
| enough on code)
|
| 3. Yeah, I get it, but maybe allowing everyone to run it
| on their own VM would be better (and providing a one
| click "click here to get your own droplet on digital
| ocean running kyrix" sort of thing). I've found that
| Docker suffers from the XKCD problem (10 different
| environments to support--what if there was just 1....11
| different environments to support!). I've almost never
| had a pleasant experience using Docker (and anything that
| requires downloading a 1GB+ image I don't consider
| pleasant). But again, I'm probably just being a grump and
| the other grads I worked with all seems to like it.
| Another idea is could use do this with SQLite? Have a
| more slimmed down version that didn't require Docker +
| those dependencies
|
| Thanks for the answers! Very cool stuff and it's a very
| interesting problem.
| tracyhenry wrote:
| Again, thanks for the feedback. Your comments are great
| food for thought!
| count wrote:
| Generally Docker lets you say 'here, this works', rather
| than 'follow these 800 steps to get your environment in the
| right shape'.
| domoritz wrote:
| Vega-Lite and Falcon author here. Many people ask for
| scalable visualizations and I think declarative visualization
| approaches are really promising since systems can
| transparently optimize data movement and rendering. I have
| done some more experiments to scale Vega such as
| https://github.com/vega/scalable-vega but I think what we
| need is a system that automatically offloads heavy
| computations to a backend such as
| https://github.com/omnisci/jupyterlab-omnisci.
| chatmasta wrote:
| Observable supports direct DB connections [0], but these only
| work in private notebooks at the moment.
|
| At Splitgraph [1] we're building a "data delivery network"
| (DDN, like a CDN but for databases) that looks like a big
| Postgres database. It works really well with the Observable
| Postgres client in private notebooks -- you configure it like
| you would for any Postgres connection. For public notebooks,
| you can use our HTTP API for sending SQL queries directly to
| the DDN. Here's an example [2] using that SQL-over-HTTP API to
| plot some Covid data.
|
| [0] https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/connecting-to-
| databas...
|
| [1] https://www.splitgraph.com
|
| [2] https://observablehq.com/@mildbyte/splitgraph-ddn-
| oxcovid19-...
| breck wrote:
| I've been watching splitgraph for a while. __Very
| __interesting what you are doing!
| chatmasta wrote:
| Thanks! That means a lot :) Much more to come.
| breck wrote:
| I've found 10MB (gzipped) to be a good rule of them. Anything
| bigger, query a backend. Storing bigger things in ephemeral tab
| memory can be painful if you refresh browser a lot.
| brandnamehq wrote:
| Great domain. We like hq domains too :)
| petulla wrote:
| My gripe with Observable is I can't fit into a Python-based
| workflow. I.e., a machine learning or gpu-training worfklow. It
| is a nice place to create explainers, though. I almost think of
| it as being like a Medium alternative.
| catacombs wrote:
| > My gripe with Observable is I can't fit into a Python-based
| workflow.
|
| Observable is for JavaScript ecosystem. I wouldn't count on
| them implementing anything for Python.
| hobofan wrote:
| With the growth expectations that come with the funding
| amount they just collected, I'd count on it. There is just so
| much more demand for data visualization and notebook-style
| projects in the Python community compared to the JS
| community.
| Jugurtha wrote:
| Could you say more about your workflow? Our platform[0] may
| suit you:
|
| - Collaborative no-setup notebooks: different images with the
| most popular libraries pre-installed. See each other's cursors,
| very useful for troubleshooting, pair programming.
|
| - Long-running notebooks: GPU ready. You can schedule notebooks
| right from the notebook view so you don't context switch. You
| can close your browser, disconnect from the internet, or shut
| your laptop and still see the notebook's execution.
|
| - Automatic params/metrics/model tracking: no boilerplate.
|
| - One click deployment: clicking a button deploys a model and
| gives you a nice "REST" API endpoint you can invoke.
|
| If you're doing anything related to ML and use notebooks, you
| probably had the above problems. We're building around Jupyter
| notebooks because in our experience, our machine learning
| projects were not held back for lack of slick stylesheets.
|
| - [0]: https://iko.ai
| pea wrote:
| For Python, Datapane may solve your use-case (I am one of the
| founders). It's an open source framework for creating HTML
| reports from text, dataframes, plots
| (altair/bokeh/plotly/folium), and files. We provide a free
| public platform for sharing reports on the web, and you can
| check out some of the things our users are building here:
| https://datapane.com/gallery/
|
| It's different to something like Observable in that you import
| it into your existing Python environment (Colab, Jupyter,
| Airflow, etc.), build the reports from your assets, and push
| them up -- as opposed to having to do the analysis itself in
| our interface.
| domoritz wrote:
| Take a look at https://www.streamlit.io/.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Can you run arbitrary libraries like Tensorflow.js?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| You can run just about anything that can be run in the
| browser (all code in an Observable notebook executes in your
| browser). Though depending on the flavour of packaging/module
| system a given package uses, you may need to figure out a
| correct magic incantation to import it.
| fractionalhare wrote:
| This is also the main thing holding me back from using it. The
| Observable experience feels more polished than Jupyter for me.
| petulla wrote:
| My hope is eventually to be able to run it locally and
| integrate it into other language, like Tensorboard.
| darksaints wrote:
| I really like Observable and have used it quite a bit, but I
| absolutely hate that it is the default documentation form for D3,
| because D3 is a javascript library, and Observable is not
| javascript. At the very least it would be nice if there was a way
| to take an example and press a button to get the same thing in
| javascript.
| carls wrote:
| A lot of the code you can write does look like JS, though. You
| can use the libraries that may be common to a JS dev. It's not
| perfect, but there's enough overlap and the differences are
| understandable and documented[1].
|
| Also having learned a lot of D3 by reading through Observable
| tutorials, I'm curious what you've seen that doesn't seem to
| work when you port it to JS?
|
| One thing I'm aware of is that you have to move a lot of the
| plotting code into the .then() method of promise when you're
| loading data.
|
| ------
|
| [1] Observable's not JavaScript:
| https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/observables-not-javas...
| macNchz wrote:
| Yeah I pulled out d3 for a project recently, having used it
| before-quite a bit at one point-but not for several years. I
| just wanted to browse some basic examples for the current
| version, to refresh my memory and familiarize myself with the
| current API, but the reliance on Observable drove me up the
| wall. Even a lot of the old examples from bl.ocks.org just
| redirect to Observable now.
|
| The presentation is one more layer to understand between
| "here's the code" and "here's what the code produces". I do
| generally like the notebook format for exploratory data work,
| but it's not at all ideal as part of a workflow for writing
| code that will fit into a larger application, in my experience.
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