I reckon you can get something quite similar with matplotlib without too much trouble, though that strongly depends on how comfortable or familiar you are with it.

Pre-observable, I used d3 to develop a very complex visualization with real-time updates. It was difficult because d3 has a lot well-thought-out-but-complex concepts, but the docs and examples helped me fully understand how it worked, and the result turned out spectacular.

A few years later, I needed to build a simple novel visualization. A major new version of d3 had come out, and all the examples and documentation got Observable-ified.

Enough time had passed that I could only vaguely recall some of the original concepts, so I set out to re-learn. YMMV but, for me, it was impenetrable. With the limited time I had, I just couldn’t figure out how to untangle d3 from observable. I gave up. Very sad.

I'm an experienced dev and looked seriously into D3 some month ago for the first time. I can confirm what you wrote. The notebooks feel like an unnecessary hurdle. It's not a big hurdle, but one that could be avoided so a slightly annoying experience.

"You can use as many italics as you want but I don’t think it’s a wildly bold claim and your counter example is simply silly."

I don't understand the relevance of any of this, but I think I've done a fair job outlining my points above. Let me give my best summary: the execution environment used by a library's (example) documentation is independent from learning the API of the library itself. I agree that newcomers to JavaScript may find plenty of confusion there, and I'm sure a decent chunk of D3's users may be new to web-programming in general, but it's not the job of D3 maintainers to account for that.

I actually think our back-and-forth is a perfect example of why open-source is so painful to work on.

D3 is one of the best documented libraries out there is. There are multiple books, hundreds of hours of youtube videos, and most importantly, dedicated maintainers (Mike Bostock, Philippe Riviere, etc.) who've poured hours into additional sources of documentation and are very responsive on GitHub issues.

The unfortunate outcome here is that users have come to expect this sort of high-quality support and documentation (again with the italics, who does this guy think he is???). Every D3 submodule has standard api documentation, sure, but thats expected of all libraries these days. However, the additional example documentation (again, nobody got paid to make this material) for the most recent releases has been migrated from bl.ocks.org (a now defunct open-source service users didn't pay for it) to Observable Notebooks. Now, Observable is a VC-backed business, yes, but the documentation is still completely free. In this thread, you mention you don't like this, so in at least one online conversation where D3 comes up, you actively advocate against using it out of principle! (Couldn't resist!).

Of course this is just my viewpoint on what has transpired, and I'm likely articulating it in a more-inflammatory-than-reality manner. But I'd prefer to have D3 documentation in the form of free, interactive Observable Notebooks rather than to have no documentation at all. Even more so if it helps out the authors of the open-source library.

As a tip for those who have difficulties going from the reactive Observable model to vanilla js -> you can always just take an observable notebook and ask AI to convert it to a set of vanilla files for you.

PS - Sorry for the novel, at an airport!

> You can use as many italics as you want

Wait. This is actually hilarious.

"Observable is obnoxious if you want to add a D3 pie chart to your Vue application and have to untangle calls to D3’s API from reactive cell values, which look like ordinary JavaScript, but are not, and will cause compilation and runtime errors when copied."

Yep - as I wrote: "If you want to just blindly copy and paste d3 code, you may have issues with the docs being hosted on observable."

If instead you learn the core api (selections, bindings, and update patterns), any chart is really just a matter of using the correct layout/generator.

Here's d3 pie: https://d3js.org/d3-shape/pie

No need for going into Observable at all, as the pie generator is completely documented.

But if, as you mentioned, you prefer to copy the code from Observable, the linked pie example is extremely simple to do so: https://observablehq.com/@d3/donut-chart/2

Zero reactive cells, you can literally just copy the code inside the cell statement (e.g. the curly braces).

> They've finally open-sourced the notebook editor?

They didn't because it's literally their core business.