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by rabryan35 2339 days ago
No mention of https://observablehq.com notebooks? They’re the best I’ve found in the “Share and collaborate” and “As products” category. JupyterLab is still pretty great for exploratory stuff, but visualization possibilities in observable are incredible.
4 comments

No one we interviewed or surveyed mentioned it.
Problem is that Javascript doesn't have the scientific computing ecosystem that Python, R and Julia have. Jupyter supports those languages and any others that people write kernels for. And you can also execute bash, JS, CSS and HTML directly in python notebooks with magic commands.
Agreed, Observable fixes a lot of the problems I've had with other notebooks. It can still be fiddly for code over a certain size/ complexity but the ability to import from npm modules goes a long way to fixing the problem. The user base seems to be predominantly drawn from the visualisation side of things + the fact that it's javascript may limit its uptake in science/maths areas. Aside: I've felt for a while that JS is really missing decent maths/stats libraries, any suggestions?
They're a walled garden and to be honest I kinda hate them.

Bostock had lots of accessible D3 examples before, now it's all on that "platform".. sure it's slick, but overall loss for the ecosystem IMO.