[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.