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by floodle 832 days ago
I just feel like they are limiting their user base by only supporting Javascript.

It's of course the de-facto language for interactive display in browsers. The use case for dashboards and data visualisation is clear. But it's an awful language for data science and data analysis, compared to Python or R.
3 comments
simonw 832 days ago
One of the neat new features of Observable Framework is you can drop in a build script to gather the data that's written in any language you like. https://observablehq.com/framework/loaders

So you absolutely can do the data processing step in R or Python and have that output JSON or CSV which is then visualized at the end using JavaScript.

Not a small feature, but I bet it would be possible to use WebAssembly to add support for Markdown blocks that get executed in other languages as well, using Pyodide for Python for example.

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no_wizard 832 days ago
>It's of course the de-facto language for interactive display in browsers

This is it, more or less.

It is far, far easier to build an app like this where you want a plethora of users as a web application than a native one, for instance.

For anything JavaScript as a runtime / language is missing, WASM can boost as well. For math and data science, WASM is a natural choice for any missing pieces

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jamra 832 days ago
I used Pyodide (https://pyodide.org/en/stable/) as a python execution environment in browser. That was pretty successful. There are also python libraries that let you generate a config which is later made responsive via a JS library. Pyodide runs in wasm.
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FarhadG 832 days ago
Can you elaborate further on what you have in mind here?
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jarpineh 832 days ago
In Observable Framework data work can be done before hand with Python or anything else really. JavaScript enjoys best integration into browser which is hard to deal with from server side.

I myself like the self-contained aspect of it, since I can publish static files. Also, D3 is the pioneering library for data viz on the web. Especially with maps, which is what I've used it for back in the day. Time to refresh those skills.

I wonder if one could combine this and reactive Python based Jupyter notebook alternative https://docs.marimo.io/guides/wasm.html

Perhaps with web component packaging it should be doable. Web component attributes might allow tying reactive events from one side to the other.

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