[whimsicalism]

The one critique I have of D3 is that it is becoming increasingly closely paired with Observable, such that when I'm searching for examples of how to make something in d3, I can only find Observable examples that require the Observable runtime in order to function properly.

I think the examples should have a JS native version in addition to the Observable implementation.

[DataCrayon]

That's part of the reason I started my book "Visualisation with D3.js"[1]... it's early access and I'm trying to find more time to work on it, but it's all JS native

[1] https://datacrayon.com/shop/product/visualisation-with-d3/

[_dwt]

It's a real pain. I work with lots of "data science" types who are often trying to concurrently learn JavaScript and d3 - often with JS as their first or second programming language. It's difficult enough for an experienced programmer coming back to d3 after a few versions to pick out what's d3 vs. what's Observable - and very difficult to help a relative newbie through the process of turning what's shown in an Observable notebook into something that can run in an ordinary web page.

[vmception]

Even more difficult to deal with that and conforming it to Vue/React SPAs

[kowlo]

Indeed - I don't like the pairing with Observable. I don't like Observable in general because the full experience can't be self-hosted. However, both projects belong to Mike, and D3.js is free - so I can't complain.

[norswap]

Didn't they have an export function that allowed self-hosting something you developped on Observable? (Or is it the development part that you want to self-host for "full experience"?)

[jacobolus]

You can self-host the runtime, and use code from notebook cells in whatever context you like. The closed part is the “notebook chrome” (editor, history view, social features, etc.).

[dimal]

What’s the difference between the two? As someone who only dips into D3 every few years and just discovered Observable, I wasn’t aware that they were different. I thought Observable was just a way of sharing D3 visualizations.

[j-pb]

Observable is like Jupyter for Javascript. A general JS notebook environment, with the added twist that it uses reactive dataflow ideas to evaluate cells in a "right" and deterministic order (a common footgun in Jupyter where cells might be reevaluated manually, resulting in unexpected state).

D3 is a JS library for data visualisations.

Both are the brainchild of Mike Bostock. That's the connection. :)

[tracyhenry]

https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/javascript-and-observ...

[th0ma5]

Someone should make an open source version of the Observable ecosystem or integrate it into Jupyter tooling better. The notebook format is not encrypted or anything.

[protoduction]

I posted this on HN a little while back [1], it's an open source alternative editor/runtime for Observable as a plugin for Starboard.

[1]: https://starboard.gg/nb/nfwK2VA

[th0ma5]

Nice!!

[j-pb]

That's a bit like complaining that there are examples on codepen.

I'm super grateful that they provide such good documentation, which is second to none, in a nicely explorable environment.

[whimsicalism]

The difference is that examples in Codepen are easily reproducable in another environment.

d3, on the other hand, has converted most of their examples to Observable, which requires extensive research to convert back to JS (in the best case) and in the worst case requires reverse engineering the runtime.

I'm not the only one with this opinion, there are plenty of others who have struggled through similar issues and discussed it.

"The process of converting an Observable notebook to standalone html and/or js is clearly not as simple and copying and pasting. The use of Observable notebooks for all D3 examples has made the introduction to the library much more challenging for this reason." [0]

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53155957/convert-d3-obse...

[1]: https://talk.observablehq.com/t/i-want-to-learn-d3-i-don-t-w...

[j-pb]

I work with both D3 and Observable full time.

The claim that one has to "reverse engineer the runtime" is simply absurd.

The people that complain about D3 on observable always turn out to have taken neither the time to understand Observable nor D3 and are looking for a way to just copy paste something into their codebase, without understanding it, and without any willingness to really learn the tools they are using. Which would have never worked in the first place, because D3 is not a plotting library like vega or observables plot, it's a library library, building material from which you can build your own bespoke visualisations.

Observable is in essence reevaluating the entire code with each "requestAnimationFrame", no fancy diffing a la react or other magic, if it runs in observable, it will also run in your code as a static thing. Copy paste the cells out of observable, prepend them with a "const" and you're done, not more work than removing and rewriting the boilerplate that's in every codepen.

[ronyeh]

> taken neither the time to understand Observable nor D3 and are looking for a way to just copy paste something into their codebase, without understanding it, and without any willingness to really learn the tools they are using.

That's how many of us learn, by dipping our toes into a new SDK by copying and pasting into our bare HTML/JS page and tweaking things to see what happens. Eventually we will get around to reading the full documentation.

I have made d3 examples and played around with the toolkit since back when it was in its infancy (called protovis or something). It has definitely become more and more difficult over the years for a beginner to jump into.

(Background: I have met Mike since I got my PhD from the hci/graphics lab at Stanford, but we did not overlap.)

[themulticaster]

This is my experience as well - when deciding whether to use a certain library or framework, I don't start reading the reference manual. Rather, I highly prefer looking at and tweaking existing examples, mostly to understand what the typical usage looks like and most importantly where the limitations lie.

I feel like the last point is often overlooked by documentation authors: When evaluating whether to use a library, I'm not just interested in what it can do, but also what it can't do! That's why I really enjoy the "you should use X if you want to do Y"/"you shouldn't use X if you want to do Z" sections present in some manuals.

[sam_goody]

this.

I am a beginner, and have spent hours in frustration, because I couldn't figure out the examples.

In every other project I would copy and paste some examples and start playing with it to understand.

[j-pb]

You make my point. What better environment to learn and twiddle, than a reactive, constantly reevaluating interactive notebook?

[ronyeh]

I don't know why others down voted you so I upvoted this comment.

All I am saying is that the d3 team needs a "getting started" page aimed at allowing a dev to include one script tag (or a single npm install) and then copy and paste examples from the example gallery to get it quickly working on their own test website.

I recently tried getting back into d3 and I gave up (opted for another low threshold SVG toolkit). It's fine if d3 is aimed at other people who want to use observable.... It's just not targeted at me anymore.

[duped]

I guess it depends on your goal. If your goal is to learn how to code a nice reactive environment like a notebook is great. If your goal is to learn how to take a library and use it in a piece of software to release to the world, the notebook is next to useless.

[hu3]

Whatever environment each user prefers.

Being softlocked into Observable is not a pro.

That's like trying to force every vim user into Jetbrain IDEs (both are great, not trying to start a flamewar here).

Sure an IDE will have more features (like Observable vs simple HTML file), but it's important to understand different people have different ways of doing things.

[jwilber]

This.

It’s literally just a matter of reordering variables, adding or removing a pair of parentheses, and removing the “return svg.node” call.

People love to complain about free open-source documentation. Especially for d3 it seems.

Shout out to Mike Bostock for all his awesome work.

[throwawaybutwhy]

Knowing what to re-order, remove/add is non-trivial for a newbie.

Relevant discussion: [0].

Let's look at the edit distance between [1] and [2]. Previous frustration at [3].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27415725

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66966625/converting-obse...

[2] https://observablehq.com/@d3/contours

[3] https://talk.observablehq.com/t/i-want-to-learn-d3-i-don-t-w...

[j-pb]

A newbie could simply use the export functionality in observable, which automatically generates iframe code, or vanilla-js code or react code for you.

Quoting other people that don't want to spend 5 minutes on their problem, doesn't make your not wanting to spend 5 minutes on your problem any more valid.

If you want a no code solution for data viz, use Excel, if finding the export button, or reordering variable declarations in an order, where things come before the things they are used by, is already too difficult, then you're not gonna understand D3 anyways.

[jwilber]

It is trivial. I just told you what to remove, and tracebacks will inform you of the ordering.

I would advise the ‘newbie’ you speak of to learn how to read a basic error message and how to use the backspace key before tackling d3!

(For reference, just this week an intern on my team needed some d3 boilerplate for a fairly complicated plot. I wrote it for her in observable, with some guidelines on where to go next. She finished what was needed and cr’d directly to our codebase - at no point did either of us worry about the supposed difficult translation between observable and a js file.)

[macNchz]

Yeah I encountered this problem recently as someone who was once reasonably familiar with d3 and came back to it after several years away.

I find myself wanting to start with a working example I can riff off of more in d3 than with many other tools I've used, so I totally understand the appeal of interactive examples in Observable but find it super frustrating and cumbersome when it comes to actually rolling what I'm working on into an existing application.