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?

Check the link provided. It's just running inside of vscode, with no communication to their servers whatsoever.

I did, it's not the same literate programming environment like I said. Are we misunderstanding each other?

"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.

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".

The definition of literate programming environment doesn't include the requirement of a GUI.

Knuths original literate programming environment consisted of a command line tool to split files that mixed pascal and tex into the pascal and tex source, to be compiled separately.

Which means that according to your definition, the original literate programming system, isn't literate programming.

I think you've steered this discussion away from the factual point that I made.

All the best.

I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding the architecture, capabilities and relationships between observable and observablehq. Not having a button next to each cell to edit it in place, is not going to impact your productivity in any way, when you can just edit the cell in the window to the left. Wether it's below or left isn't a meaningful difference, and shouldn't have an impact on wether or not it's a suitable replacement or superior/inferior to other notebooks.

Hope you'll look at it again in the future. In a sense it's your loss, so good luck and take care.

It sounds like you confirmed that it can't be self-hosted - are you sure about it not being true?

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.

Just to jump in and say my comment that you said wasn't true was "... improvement over an existing literate programming environment.".

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.