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Comment by ZeroCool2u | Hacker News Reader

The SWE in me is very enthusiastic about this. I love the push that Mozilla is making with WASM in really practical and tangible ways.

That being said, I have a hard time seeing myself moving from Python to JS for any 'real' data science work when I get a lot of the more advanced viz features here for free from libraries like plotly without having to touch JS and with similar or better performance. Not to mention, I don't have any desire to move away from PyCharm after getting comfortable with and really taking advantage of of its full feature set.

I think for small projects this could be very useful, especially with GDocs style real time collaboration, but for now I can't see myself or my teammates taking advantage of this.

That being said, I vote full steam ahead and lets see where this takes us!

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If I'm reading the near the end of the post correctly, they actually compiled Numpy, Pandas, SciPy, and scikit-learn to WebAssembly and have one video at the end of the post showing a python-only visualization running in the browser.

You are reading that correctly.

(disclaimer: I work on Iodide)

+1 - this is the right attitude to have! If you have a productive data science team, you should continue to use the tools you have - we'd be the first to tell you that. Re: the JS thing, we've found through user testing and our own experience as data scientists that folks don't really want to use JS for anything, and we want to meet some segment of data scientists where they are. As explained in the post, JS as a language and ecosystem isn't quite there in the way that it needs to be. In a few years, it may be, if you follow along w/ the various TC39 proposals out there.

To clarify, we do have support for Python / NumPy / Pandas / Matplotlib / others with Pyodide, which is natively supported in Iodide with the `%% py` delimiter. It doesn't address all the other workflow issues you have, of course, and there are some differences b/t a server kernel and what we have.

I agree: you’d have to quite literally force me to use JS to do data science stuff.

Surely there’s a better solution here? Maybe something like pandoc but for presenting science stuff in the browser? Do your work in whatever language, write up results and graphs using preferred tools and packages, output some kind of format that can be parsed to produce this stuff?

Iodide does actually support that workflow, both in JS and our wasm python stack (Pyodide). We have some data scientists internally who have made Iodide reports using only pandas & matplotlib. It's still early days for this tech, but it's quite doable.

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