Mike Bostock is a beast - this d3.js example from 2013 still blows my mind: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012...

I haven’t gotten properly stuck into observable - in what ways is it better than using a jupyter notebook?

I don't know about "better" as I don't have a lot of experience with either—I've only dabbled or used them to prototype something small. The major differentiator is the JS implementation and ability to import libraries from sibling notebooks and other sources.

But yeah I'd have to agree that Bostock is a beast.

I like Observable for sharing JS tutorials - was just updating https://observablehq.com/@lmeyerov/manipulating-flat-arrays-... today.

Observable does some things quite well for that use case:

-- Easier dependencies: no need for 'npm install', just 'require(...)'

-- URL publishing

-- Collaborative merge flow

However, Jupyter made some good decisions that make it win over Observable for our day-to-day data work:

-- Manual reexecution vs. automatic: when working with big data, outside APIs, etc., Observable's automatic reexecution is a non-starter

-- Fully open source, embeddable, and successful history of non-vc funding: Jupyter is organized and provided in a way companies ( who aren't Amazon ;-)) can rally around, evidenced by contributions by Bloomberg etc.

-- Access to underlying unix/windows env and multiple environments (multiple Python versions, ...). As much as I wish Observable's choice of JS could provide a viable data environment, and I've personally invested in making it so and the path to making it first-class is clear, we need way more gov/google/nvidia/etc. support.

Ultimately, for not-too-sensitive collaborative data work, we use Google Colab, then offline and sensitive commercial work via Jupyter (Graphistry ships with it preloaded for GPU dataframe & GPU visual graph analytics goodness!), and if we did more in JS tutorial land, Observable would be my first choice.

Very cool, thanks for the detailed reply - your JS tutorial looks great :)

Yeah automatic re-execution sounds like a weird design choice. Think I'll stick with Jupyter notebooks for now...

> and ability to import libraries from sibling notebooks

The Jupyter documentation includes an example for importing other notebooks here: https://jupyter-notebook.readthedocs.io/en/stable/examples/N...

completely agree, that thing is sick!

while you're browsing: this is equally great :)

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013...

Yeah I remember seeing that one a few years ago - it's also super cool :)

Especially crazy that these work as well and quickly on mobile!

No self hosting? What do you mean?

The (reactive JavaScript) Observable runtime is open source, and every notebook is available compiled as an ES Module.

You can embed notebooks in their entirety on any webpage, or just grab the embed code for an individual cell, if the notebook produces a single visualization.

For the details in all their nitty gritty, see: https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/downloading-and-embed...

Does that now include the ability to create and edit, or still just run? Having to rely on a third party to create and edit could be problematic for some purposes.

A comment from May last year [1] says "But that won’t include the editable notebook interface or the rest of observablehq.com - unlike Jupyter, we’re really aiming to create a community and cross-pollination of concepts and code rather than individual installations. We might eventually launch something that enables offline editing, but that’s a bit further out in the future."

[1] https://talk.observablehq.com/t/noob-can-you-run-your-own-ob...

Also polynote.

> Polynote is an experimental polyglot notebook environment. Currently, it supports Scala and Python (with or without Spark), SQL, and Vega.

https://github.com/polynote/polynote

I've been tinkering with Data-Forge Notebook. https://www.data-forge-notebook.com/

It supports javascript and typescript relatively new but capable.

Nextjournal's another one in this space, more focused on reproducibility and polyglot support.

https://nextjournal.com