[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.

[slumpt_]

Your post comes off really condescending and shitty. I don’t think it’s necessarily true, either.

I think a lot of newbies might just find the Observable stuff a bit overwhelming. Maybe their background isn’t JavaScript. That does not mean they aren’t gonna understand.

What are you even suggesting. They aren’t capable? We must all look like ants to you, up there.

As a dev with over a decade of experience in the front-end and no issues picking up d3 on my own, I still sympathize with overwhelmed newbies. Mike is trying to shove Observable down everyone’s throats in hopes of getting a good valuation and selling it some day, and I don’t blame him wanting to cash in D3 for this purpose. But let us recognize it plainly, and recognize the adverse consequences that has on a subset of the userbase.

And it’s fine if he doesn’t want those people on for the ride. It may also just mean a long-term atrophy of the D3 community.

[j-pb]

> Mike is trying to shove Observable down everyone’s throats in hopes of getting a good valuation and selling it some day

That's an allegation that completely contradicts mikes and observables behaviour to date. They are insanely obsessed with making the barrier of entry of observable as low as possible, give most of the code away as open source, and are more concerned about empowering minorities than having a working business.

But what has it earned them? A bunch of ungrateful brats that couldn't code their way out of a hole if their lives depended on it.

Can you imagine people from any other profession being this whiney and entitled? "Heres a free plan for a bridge! BuT It'S iN MeTrIC SySteM :(!", "CiVIl EnGinEErINg is NoT MAtH!", "I doN'T WanT tO Do A DeStrUCtiVe TeST, CaN'T We JuSt ShIP iT???"

I come off as condescending? Good! I'm tired of catering to the absolute minimum. Observable is f** simple, if you don't have the ability or drive or whatever to learn it, and appreciate the help it provides in learning D3, you won't be able to learn D3. That's not me being mean, that's just realistic. D3 is super f*n hard, I have to look up stuff 24/7, because it's not build to be easy, it's build to be the most generic thing you can imagine to make visualisations.

Let's be real, the people don't complain about observable because they're overwhelmed newbies, but because they don't want to do their job. It's the people that copy paste stuff into their codebase without a glimmer of an attempt to understand it. Spend 10 minutes inside an interactive playground understanding the tool you're gonna use? MoNKeY WAnNt CopY PAsTe NoW!

The living personification of legacy code, the kind of coworker some poor person that actually takes the whole software _engineering_ thing seriously has to clean up after.

Ironically it's do-gooders like Mike and Melody that brought us into this mess in the first place, with their "everybody can be empowered to program" and "always say 'yes, and...'" bull**.

You act as if D3 documentation in observable was some kind of burden, when in reality observable is a bunch of training wheels.

Importing the library is not the difficult part, neither is selecting the DOM node to attach to, the difficult part is the selections, scales, axis, tics, interaction helpers, drawing helpers, simulations, layouts and whatnot.

But sure take the training wheels off! Shaving those 2 pounds of your bike will surely make it go a bit faster. But since you were unwilling to learn how to ride it in the first place, it's just gonna make you fall on your face more quickly.

[slumpt_]

Oof. Man. Your attitude is what makes software less diverse and hospitable.

I know there are some folks who maybe come with sincere laziness, but the hard push with observable complicates an already complex thing. You don’t have to agree.

Keep being mad or whatever and shitting on newcomers to the field. I’ll stick to welcoming folks and trying to hear the merit in their complaints.

[j-pb]

Don't turn this into a diversity argument. We need more diversity in software from more diverse backgrounds. We just need less people in software in general. Especially less mediocre ones.

Guess who drives out female talent? Mediocre male white nerds who think they know it all and who don't have the open mindedness to learn tools like observable.

ObservableHQ is one of the most impactfull diversity pushing companies I've seen, but you accuse them of some ulterior motives for having the audacity of writing and hosting amazing D3 docs.

[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.)