Re:I want to learn D3. I don’t want to learn Observable. Is ...
by borrowcheckfml on Sunday June 13, 2021 @10:15AM
(#27492789)
I had no idea that the creator of d3js is also the co-founder of Observable! Now this move makes a lot more sense. I'm starting to believe this may be another case where the creator (rightly so) wanted to find a way to monetize his popular open source project. It's a shame this happened. I don't blame him, but the broken open source business model.
Re:I want to learn D3. I don’t want to learn Observable. Is ...
by slumpt_ on Sunday June 13, 2021 @10:56AM
(#27493163)
Yep, this is 100% my read.
It’s a damn shame too because d3 is fabulous and I thought he’d already encountered enough wealth through his work with NYT etc.
Surely there’s a way to grow Observable without cannibalizing d3.
Re:I want to learn D3. I don’t want to learn Observable. Is ...
by inigojonesguy on Sunday June 13, 2021 @12:29PM
(#27493927)
I used D3 v5 only for the force directed graphs part, independently in an artificial life & lambda calculus project. Is maybe too much for such an austere domain, since I saw comments that the result is "unnecessarily flashy". Give me any other visually comparable, but lower level js library for the same purpose and I'll take it. I'm not a programmer, but to paraphrase Mark Twain from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, I felt "I was standing in the awful presence of the Mother of the" functional_programming "language".
For me, it just wasn't worth the effort of learning D3 AND Observable (especially, not being particularly fond of JS to start with) - in the end, it was too much, and I ended up using a simpler third party javascript charting library instead - which was a real shame, because I really loved what D3 could achieve.
Mike Bostock is clearly a genius, but I think his brain is wired differently from the rest of us mere mortals - and unfortunately, he seems to have the knack of making simple things terribly complicated.