Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview • Hacker News Board

Re: Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview

#61

Post by jitl » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 12:32 PM UTC

mbostock wrote: post #18

jitl wrote: post #7

I used the older online notebooks for a bit and really loved the immediacy but I’m always hurting for TypeScript syntax support. The is this a thing w 2.0? Something I’ll need to add later with Vite and only available locally? It was a bunmer to not be able to copy paste code from my projects into observable. With local notebooks I see more potential for homegrown workflow but for me the benefit was always the platfo…

We’re interested in adding a TypeScript cell mode, probably first with type stripping rather than validating types. I was hoping for a pure JavaScript implementation; maybe we’ll try https://github.com/bloomberg/ts-blank-space ? I’ve also been looking at https://github.com/val-town/codemirror-ts for the editor, but it’s a lot of machinery.

I would only expect type stripping, although it seems you already have the TypeScript language server hanging out in the editor for completion and docs and such, it’s not much extra challenge to get the VFS hooked up enough to show red squiggles in CodeMirror. I built a CodeMirror + typescript for the React docs site and it’s definitely machinery but not too bad maybe 600-800 LoC (never got merged, sad)

Re: Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview

#62

Post by threecheese » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 2:17 PM UTC

Hasnep wrote: post #57

dr__mario wrote: post #14

I'd love to love them but I don't: I can't seem to justify moving away from Python to use this. What advantages does JS offer for this use case? I' ve never felt that I couldn't do any visualization with Python (but I don't do nice newspaper figures).

I think marimo is a python version of the same idea: https://marimo.io/

I am loving Marimo, I think they are doing a good job of balancing ease of use with the ability to drop into a virtualenv and run the code. The UI is much nicer than colab, from a visual and feature perspective. Key for me though is repeatability and ability to collaborate at the branch level, shared notebooks have issues we all know about.

What’s missing for me is a local desktop app like Jupyter Studio, but that’s an easy thing for the community to build.

Re: Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview

#63

Post by amdivia » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 4:52 PM UTC

gaws wrote: post #53

amdivia wrote: post #47

Would this be open source? I would really like to run this locally For the time being I hacked something using Observable Framework [1], but still, it isn't the full set 1: https://observablehq.com/framework/ Edit: nvm just saw the notebook kit

> Would this be open source? No? How would they make money?

Part of it is open source (The part I care about)

Observable Notebook Kit | Observable https://observablehq.com/notebook-kit/kit

Re: Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview

#64

Post by mritchie712 » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 1:58 PM UTC

bsimpson wrote: post #31

mritchie712 wrote: post #22

Observable has always demo'd well and looked cool, but I never understood the business application. Does anyone use it for work?

I work on a quantitative user research team, and we've found notebooks to be really useful for crunching and visualizing the data from experiments we've run. I work at Google and my UXR colleagues are more comfortable with Python than JS, so we use Google Colab, but I'd use Observable if those weren't true.

yeah, I know notebooks are used broadly (used them for years myself). I just haven't run into companies using Observable specifically in the wild.