Observable Vs Jupyter or not

Feedback
1

Hello,

I have two questions, is observable ever going to use other languages
(hoping python)? My second question is, is observable trying to replace Jupyter notebooks when it comes to data science or is it here to support the data science process and support Jupyter users.

I am new to observable I just want to know where it stands.

Thanks.

2 Likes
2

Can we get a reply on this?

1 Like
3

I use both Python via Jupyter and Javascript via Observable on an almost daily basis. Aside from the fact that they both involve programming in a notebook environment, they seem very different to me.

Python excels at dealing with large data files on your hard drive and has a much more mature environment for scientific computation. Javascript is great for designing very impressive interactive illustrations for display in a web browser. Clearly they can both do other things and there is overlap, but they largely complement one another.

Observable is very clearly a Javascript based technology optimized to run in the browser. I donā€™t think thereā€™s any reason to suspect it will support Python anytime soon.

2 Likes
4

there is also a documentation that might be helpful to your question

2 Likes
5

I havenā€™t investigated too deeply, but folks who like Observable and want to use Julia on their local machine instead of Javascript on the web might enjoy ā€œPlutoā€ notebooks, which were inspired by Observable.

2 Likes
6

I use Jupyter notebook with Observable. I got frustrated not being able to customize matplotlib charts. I do all my data wrangling with Pandas, generate a JSON/CSV file, use scp to upload it to my server and then access it in Observable.

You can do the following in a Jupyter notebook:

dataframe.to_csv('file.csv')
!scp file.csv some-ssh-config:/path/to/website/

You will need to setup a SSH config in ~/.ssh/config and make use of keys so you donā€™t have to enter a password. You will need to configure your web server to support SSL and CORS.

There is a JS ā€œversionā€ of Pandas called Danfo.js which might allow you to do your data wrangling in Observable but I havenā€™t used it.

4 Likes
7

Thanks for your answers.