[amitp]

I love ObservableHQ! I think it's a neat model that fixes a lot of things I didn't like about notebooks. I don't use it much though. It makes the simple things easier but it makes the complex things harder. Examples:

1. I often start making a diagram interactive by adding a slider connected to some state. The slider/state is in one "viewof" cell and the diagram is in another cell. But for more polished work I often want to use direct manipulation, where you move something around in the diagram itself. In my usual JS+Vue code it's a small amount of extra work. But in ObservableHQ it seems like a lot of work: the diagram has to modify state defined in a different cell (breaking the simple spreadsheet model in my head), and the diagram is being re-rendered while it has event handlers active.

2. I often start out by making one diagram. This is nice and easy. But then I want to make multiple diagrams with some shared state. In my usual JS+Vue code I can lift the diagram code into a function, pass in a shared object for shared state, and instantiate objects for non-shared state. In ObservableHQ those properties are in cells, and I can't generate multiple cells programatically (afaik).

I also would prefer to host things myself, both because of longevity, but also because I sometimes work offline (e.g. in a park or on a train). And the biggest reason I'm not using ObservableHQ is that I'm so much slower editing text on it than I am in Emacs. So I continue to use ObservableHQ for some simple projects/prototypes but I don't do a lot with it.

[kragen]

Yeah, the centralization aspect is a big turnoff for me. I'd thought about the direct-manipulation issue (the rather crude visualization of skeletonization I linked below benefits a lot from it) but not the multiple-projections problem. Can't you put the entire state in one cell and then create multiple cells that render some reduced dimensionality projection of it? Or do you mean that there's no way to factor out the aggregation of three such projections into a reusable unit?

I recently walked my girlfriend through your explorable on populating landscapes with Perlin noise btw. It was great.