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Comment by goatlover | Hacker News Reader

There's a reason why you would want to run Python and that's the huge, well supported scientific computing libraries it has.

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Absolutely! We all quite like Python, and there's no denying that JavaScript doesn't have the same caliber and range of scientific code (yet!).

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.

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.

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.

The point wasn't that there is something wrong with Python, the point was that Jupyter requires local installation whereas Observable doesn't require installation of any kind.

Yep, Python is my language for work and teaching, especially for data projects. Doesn't mean I don't envy the interactivity and visualization potential working in JS.

I was just thinking about a proliferation of Javascript statistical libraries popping up... only an NPM away. And I shuddered a little.

And then it occurred to me that CRAN and NPM have a fair bit in common. Both have a package for anything you might imagine, and both have a mix of amazing and less-than-amazing quality.

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