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Comment by jordache | Hacker News Reader

data visualization that is interactive and works on a platform that is universal. python produces only static output right?

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https://bokeh.pydata.org offers a nice dynamic chart library from Python. It has a js helper library to handle to dynamism.

https://bokeh.pydata.org/en/latest/docs/gallery/hexbin.html

Write Python, make interactive web plots.

What? No. Check out Jupyter, for example. Of course that's a totally different platform, but I wouldn't call that "static".

but you need a special viewer to run the output.. huge friction. That's a none-starter for almost everyone.

everyone has a web browser...

...The Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text.

http://jupyter.org/

Calling it "live" seems just slightly inaccurate to me. Every time code needs to run an http request needs to be made. (Unless there's some new tech here I'm unaware of)

This is a limitation that may make no difference in some cases, but in others it is important for code to execute in the client.

A good example of this is making a visualization that seamlessly responds to the user's mouse pointer.

But it is static. The visual output is usually in jpg form. That's pretty much the definition of static output.

The only output I can find in Jupyter that is not static is coming from Bokeh which takes Python and generates javascript code to run in the browser. Jupyter itself calls this "a style of D3".

Jupyter is just the editor and viewer. It can plug in a lot of stuff, including maps and videos, but those are prepared using other libraries.

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