This is not a complaint, but merely a comment from a coworker. There are important semantic and syntactic differences. This came up as I recommended using Observable as a core tool for documenting AgentScript, a “kit” for making agent based models. It was followed by “Oh boy, another thing to learn…

The parser for the notebook documents all the added syntax, although that may be too low level for your use cases.

This is a great idea for documentation. I started one in April (it’s called “Observable’s not JavaScript!” even). I put a bit more work into today and it should be available soon, time permitting. Thanks for the feedback!

To briefly dive into the absurdity of modern parsing toolchains :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:: for us and probably most projects that implement new languages or language features, you have a few different parsers with really different priorities. Our Acorn -based parser that we use to translate to J…

@tom Whoa, fascinating! You’re having too much fun! Is there any chance we could use your experience, either with prettifing ObservableScript or with translating cells to JS, to tease out the “diff” between JS & Observable for documentation purposes? It would at least nail all the syntax issues.

Here it is! Please send feedback or suggestions. [image] Observable’s not JavaScript An Observable notebook by Observable.

Observable is not JavaScript! Documentation?

Help

backspaces June 13, 2019, 3:35pm 4

Possibly "prettier" code formatting would be useful? It hit all the syntactic differences.

Topic		Replies	Views
VSCode Observable JS Extension (v0.4.8) Show and tell	0	681	June 23, 2021
observable-press // a publishing pattern for notebooks	6	1727	March 15, 2019
Export final code? Help	39	22587	December 18, 2018
VSCode Observable JS Extension (v0.4.2) Show and tell	20	4042	February 19, 2022
Try the new Observable today Announcements	59	539	July 3, 2026

Observable is not JavaScript! Documentation?

Related topics