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Comment by dr__mario | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to love them but I don't: I can't seem to justify moving away from Python to use this. What advantages does JS offer for this use case? I' ve never felt that I couldn't do any visualization with Python (but I don't do nice newspaper figures).

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Im in the same boat. In theory JavaScript holds more potential to make finely crafted visuals. But you're right, the ecosystem is so mature I still find other ecosystems lacking.

But if anything would change my opinion this has the right set of values

I'm not really a JavaScript person either, but that hasn't been the worst problem with observable. Tools like vega-lite and importable tools from other notebooks really reduces the amount of code I need to write. Like, I'm not writing d3 code for hours for a simple choropleth. What makes it easier is that I can query objects using SQL rather than lengthy JavaScript code.

Exporting as client-side webpages, maybe? I liked using it to prototype some interactive D3.js charts that I would later move to my website. Also some people just are more comfortable with JS than Python

Maybe I just don't know enough python libraries but I can get to a good-looking interactive visual in Observable in almost no time at all.

It depends where you're coming from, I suppose. The web is pretty popular. Web developers are more familiar with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and with various visualization libraries in the JavaScript ecosystem. I quite like Observable Plot [1].

I'm not familiar enough with Python or Jupyter to know how you would build similar visualizations with them. What would you use?

[1] https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/plot-gallery

You'd have to do some styling, but Plotly is what I'd use to recreate the graphs on the gallery page there. It would obviously require some work to match the exact styling, but it should all be doable and TTFP would probably be much lower assuming you're starting with a Plotly express template.

https://plotly.com/python/

I think marimo is a python version of the same idea: https://marimo.io/

I am loving Marimo, I think they are doing a good job of balancing ease of use with the ability to drop into a virtualenv and run the code. The UI is much nicer than colab, from a visual and feature perspective. Key for me though is repeatability and ability to collaborate at the branch level, shared notebooks have issues we all know about.

What’s missing for me is a local desktop app like Jupyter Studio, but that’s an easy thing for the community to build.

> never felt that I couldn't do any visualization with Python

Yes but, probably what they are shooting for are mini apps that you can just copy pasted into a front-end codebase and not some weird-ass python dsl

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