No doubt you're right, but I don't think JS is well suited for scientific computing. At least Python gives you operator overloading. Julia and R are designed for this field. It's better for JS to remain on the presentation side for anything sophisticated.
Forgive me if I read the response wrong but that seems like exactly what the author is saying? Do your computing in Python/R, export a generated CSV, and then present it in Observable?
With the possibility that WebAssembly and WebGL will make the libraries in Python/R available to JS. Which might be alright. You probably won't be able to utilize vectorization with operators.
Re:Show HN: Observable Notebooks
by stochastic_monk on Wednesday January 31, 2018 @01:25PM
(#16276162)
What’s the status of d3 ports to Python? I believe plotly, d3py, and Bokeh all offer some amount of support.
I’d expect more python users to bring d3 in that bring python to JavaScript.
I fully expect plenty of people to do some of the data-crunching in Python, Julia, R, and so on, and bring it into Observable to explore and experiment. And I also expect JavaScript's ecosystem to blossom, especially with WebAssembly & WebGL hitting the mainstream.