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Observable is not JavaScript https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/observables-not-javascript https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/observables-not-javas...

• j-pb 6y ago
  Yeah but it's close enough (in the sense that it's like JSX, syntactic sugar over a JS runtime), so an in depth comparison would still be usefull.
• jacobolus 6y ago
  It’s misleading to take this headline and not actually read the document and notice how few these differences are. Observable cells are basically Javascript, with a small handful of additional conveniences (most importantly: they can reference other cells reactively) which make a huge improvement in the notebook context, and make Observable significantly more pleasant than any other notebook environment (Jupyter, Mathematica, etc.). Javascript libraries and code snippets can be used as-is in an Observable notebook, and anything in Observable cells can be straightforwardly ported to vanilla JS at the expense of a bit of effort and slightly uglier code. (Or the Observable runtime and standard library can be used directly externally.)
• TeMPOraL 6y ago
  It's still JavaScript, just implicitly transformed to execute in a different way than it would if you put all the cells you've written in a single file. If I write a macro in Common Lisp that packages my code in a lambda, establishes a bit of dynamic context around its execution, and perhaps walks the code itself to modify some of its contents, this doesn't make uses of that macro "not Lisp". Yet that's what's happening here, just with less elegant machinery as JS doesn't have proper macros.
  • deleted 6y ago
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