[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.

[j-pb]

If you think that the trivial differences between the two environments makes either of them useless to learn the other, franky I'll doubt you'll have the skill to learn D3 properly at all.

Taking a dom node and hooking it into the dom is not magic in D3. All that obervable does is hook in any dom node you return for you.

[protoduction]

I wasn't sure whether I was going to comment, but this kind of comment is rather unhelpful and poor form. Some may prefer not to have a (mock) notebook runtime in their application for good reason that has nothing to do with their skill.

I see you are passionate about defending Observable, and that's cool - it's a great piece of tech, but please remember that everybody's requirements are different and valid too.

[j-pb]

Then don't use the runtime and rewrite the code to plain js. All you have to do is declare cell contents as variables, and replace the first D3 select, that attaches to a reified dom node, with an #id selector. D3 is a series of tools, where the difficult parts are completely orthogonal to what observable provides.

It's like complaining that you can't learn how to drive in the evening, because there is a different sky color, than during the time you'll take your morning commute. The sky color is not the relevant nor difficult part.

I have my own (different) complaints about observable, but I'm sick and tired of bottom of the barrel programmers complaining about free stuff not being pre-digested enough for them.