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Observable Playground

beta.observablehq.com

152 pointsmbostock15 comments

I have been playing with Observable for a few months now, and it is the programming environment of my dreams.

There have been many times in the past I wish I could preview the results of a computation when tuning parameters or data, and this allows me to do it and without restricting my expressiveness or domain. Note: I am predominately thinking of graphical and data exploration use cases.

An example where I think observablehq has allowed me to go beyond the status quo is my port of Wave Function Collapse https://beta.observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/wave-function-c... (early stages). I added the ability to mask individual tiles in the tilesets dynamically and the effect on the generated images is non-intuitive but very satisfying. Manually editing the tilesets in XML which is what the original requires would be too laborious, so its a domain where observablehq really shines. I have more work to make it truly idiomatic of observablehq but the sign that its a genuine force multiplier is there.

Thank you for the encouragement!

I like everything about Observable but the editing experience. In 2018 no one wants to write code like writing txt files.

Is there any plan to adopt Language Server Protocol so at least users could get auto completions? But with the custom syntaxes to JS I guess Observable can't just use plain TypeScript Language Server.

Hey there - have you tried hitting Tab while editing code? We've implemented dynamic code completion that works in a surprising number of cases where no other completion can work - for example, completing properties of API responses, based on the real values in the environment.

But, of course we have a long way to go, especially relative to the VSCode/TypeScript ecosystem.

Never know that existed! Maybe you can improve discoverability by doing that on typing a dot.

You are a unique innovator Mike, I am not really into visualization but I am a big fan of yours.

This is really neat! Is there a way to embed these cells into another site, so they could be used in a blog for example?

There sure is!

Here's the introductory post, explaining how you can download or link Observable notebooks as ES modules, and use the open-source runtime to evaluate notebooks or just render specific cells: https://beta.observablehq.com/@jashkenas/downloading-and-emb...

Here's an example of a toy notebook being embedded on another domain: http://ashkenas.com/breakout/

Finally, because Observable notebooks are of course, themselves, web pages, here's an example of a notebook embedding itself: https://beta.observablehq.com/@jashkenas/ouroboros-a-noteboo...

Thanks so much!

I love Observable.

Word processors? Spreadsheets? PowerPoint? I see a shift towards interactive notebooks. So weird to me that this innovation of Mathematica took twenty-five years to gain traction, but yes please!

Wow, this is cool, especially the tweet import. Can see this as being a vastly improved Jupyter notebook for JS.

Thanks! The ability to reuse code across notebooks—making notebooks analogous to ES modules—I hope is one of the most powerful and interesting features of Observable. You can see a few more examples of reusable notebooks here:

https://beta.observablehq.com/collection/@observablehq/libra...

Seeing this on HN, almost thought it's no longer beta ;) (in the URL)

Hey Mike! Thanks for d3, etc. Is the playground newly released today?

We deployed it yesterday and announced it today.

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