[jwilber]

Observable is much more than its library, plot. You mean to compare plot to plotly.

There are a number of reasons to choose Observable’s plot over plotly, but to address your point, there is no lock-in here with using plot for the view - you can seemingly use any JS library, including plotly, vega, D3, etc., so I don’t think that’s a huge issue.

I agree with your point regarding convincing other scientists to use JavaScript - that was the biggest point of failure for Observable notebook adoption that I saw. (As an anecdote, rather than adopt Observable, my science team @bigtech decided to write a Jupyter -> interactive static site transpiler, so the scientists could continue their work in python). Observable 2.0 seems built on recognizing that friction, and making it so that the it’s much easier for non-js users to collaborate. But the npm dependency will still scare many data folks away.

To anyone from observable reading: I think getting mass adoption involves making this as seamless for python users as possible. (E.g. something similar to marimo notebooks or evidence). Also: great work!

[mbostock]

I don’t think the `npm install` will scare people away (Evidence uses that, too), and we’ve definitely tried to make the onboarding process as guided as possible (shout-out to clack.cc for a great CLI prompt library):

https://observablehq.com/framework/getting-started

And plus you can import libraries directly from a CDN rather than needing to use npm or yarn to manage dependencies. (Though we plan on supporting the latter in the future, too.)

https://observablehq.com/framework/javascript/imports

See this example for getting started with Python:

https://github.com/observablehq/framework/tree/main/examples...

But of course we’d love to add more affordances and documentation for other languages. We’re naturally biased towards JavaScript as our focus has historically been on visualization, but I like to think we’re making progress on the polyglot dream.

[time4tea]

Importing libs from a cdn is a big no-no for almost any system I work on - they are just another way of surveilling users on the Internet, and building information about the insides of organisations.

[mbostock]

We plan on downloading the imported libraries during build so that they are self-hosted, so it’s effectively another way to install them without having to run `npm install`. We also plan on supporting importing libraries from node_modules. And you can already import local modules so you can install libraries by manually downloading them, too.