On: Observable’s Not JavaScript

[lwb]

Am I right in thinking that this is mostly interesting for statistics-adjacent fields? I imagine someone using this mostly to embed charts and graphs alongside code a la Jupyter Notebooks.

What would be fascinating to me is if these tools made it significantly easier to make "Explorable Explanations" (nicky case, bret victor).

I love the Raft visualization (https://raft.github.io/) and would be ecstatic to see more stuff like that surfacing around, making it easier to grok sophisticated distributed systems. Next logical step would be to actually control said systems from the visualization itself.

[jashkenas → lwb]

In that case, you may be interested in checking out some of the fancy explorable explanations folks have been publishing: https://observablehq.com/collection/@observablehq/explorable...

Here’s a sequence of sound wave primers by Dylan Freedman: https://observablehq.com/@freedmand/sounds

Mike wrote an exploration of the Lotka-Volterra equations for simulating the dynamics of populations of predators and prey: https://observablehq.com/@mbostock/predator-and-prey

Or something physical, like Jacob Rus figuring out how a chunk of metal from a machinist’s workshop can scribe out a perfect sine curve: https://observablehq.com/@jrus/sinebar

Or something fun, with Krist Wongsuphasawat’s tapioca pearl to tea level Boba Calculator: https://observablehq.com/@kristw/boba-science

Or my personal favorite (although I can't view it in Chrome), Toph Tucker’s poignant reverie on correlation, eugenics, and the morality of applying statistics to human affairs: https://observablehq.com/@tophtucker/inferring-chart-type-fr...

[mathisonian → lwb]

You might be interested in Idyll [1], a project that I started as part of my research at UW. One of the explicit goals is to make it easier to create explorable explanations.

[1] - https://idyll-lang.org/

[jacobolus → lwb]

(a) This tool does make it significantly easier to make explorable explanations, and in particular facilitates sharing / re-using code and ideas.

(b) This tool is useful in a wide variety of fields that are not statistics- or data-visualization-adjacent.

Personally I find it to be the best (most reader friendly) available platform for most types of code documentation and learning materials, as long as the code involved happens to be Javascript. I would also love to see more research papers published as notebooks.

[coldsnap427 → lwb]

> Am I right in thinking that this is mostly interesting for statistics-adjacent fields?

Eh. Not entirely right. Many journalists, specifically those who work with data analysis and visualization, use Observable notebooks in their reporting. Other groups also use the notebooks for documentation purposes.