[mbostock]

We’re working on zooming and panning for Observable Plot (https://github.com/observablehq/plot/pull/1738) and other interactions such as brushing (https://github.com/observablehq/plot/pull/721) — all of this is already possible, we just haven’t packaged it up in a convenient way yet (https://github.com/observablehq/plot/pull/1871). And as skybrian pointed out, you can also get interactivity “for free” with Observable’s reactivity and re-rendering.

We’ve been focused primarily on the static display of visualizations because that’s what viewers see first, and often that’s often the only thing they see. Relying too heavily on interaction places an onus on the user to find the insights; a good display of data should be opinionated about what it shows and guide the user to what is interesting.

We’re not trying to convince you to switch to JavaScript here — a main value prop of Observable Framework is that you can write data loaders in any language (Python, R, Go, Julia, etc.). So do all your data preparation and analysis in whatever language you like, and then do your front-end in JavaScript to leverage the graphics and interactive compute capabilities of modern browsers. It’s pipes and child_process.spawn under the hood. And you still get instant reactivity when you save changes to your data loaders (when you edit Python) because Framework watches files and pushes new data to the client with reactive hot data & module replacement.

And you can compress (aggregate or filter) the data as much as you like, so it’s up to you how much data you send to the client. For example your data loader could be a minimal CSV file that’s just the numbers you need for a bar chart. Or it could be a Parquet file and you use DuckDB (https://observablehq.com/framework/lib/duckdb) on the client to generate dynamic visualizations.

[oulipo]

Interesting!

What are your thoughts on PRQL (integrated with DuckDB)?

Also: sure, I get your point on opinionated viz, but this means someone already "played with the data" to figure out what to viz "cleanly", and then coded that

now what if we want to build a viz to do this first "data playground" allowing to ruffle with the data? we would need some sort of interactivity

[zurfer]

I also love how Observable Plot looks, but agree with top poster, the things that keep me from switching are: - Python wrapper - Out of the box interactivity

[mbostock]

We’re working on the interactivity, but we’re not going to do a Python wrapper as the goal of Observable Framework (and Plot) is to leverage web technologies with JavaScript in the front-end for interactive graphics — while doing whatever language you like, including Python, on the back-end for data analysis. There is a R wrapper for Observable Plot (https://github.com/juba/obsplot) and so I imagine someone could write one for Python, but ultimately we don’t think you’ll need it with Framework’s polyglot data loaders since you can seamlessly move between languages (front-end and back-end).

[ddanieltan]

FYI: Same dev building obsplot is also building a Python version at https://github.com/juba/pyobsplot

[mbostock]

Ah, that’s what I thought at first, but I googled for “obsplot” and found the R one and thought I misremembered. Thank you for the correction.