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This is a very bizarre take. If you want to just blindly copy and paste d3 code, you may have issues with the docs being hosted on observable. But absolutely ze

This is a very bizarre take. If you want to just blindly copy and paste d3 code, you may have issues with the docs being hosted on observable. But absolutely zero part of the d3 api (or core design patterns of use) have anything to do with observable. It’s like saying, “I refuse to use PyTorch because their docs are built with mkdocs.” Moreover, even if the coupling were limiting (which, again, it is not), it’s odd to attack observable since everything they put out is fully open-source. It’s not like they’re hiding docs behind a paywall, they’re actively contributing to the viz ecosystem through basically everything they release (eg Observable Plot, Observable framework). As far as echarts goes, it’s a great tool. The declarative syntax for charting always feels a bit odd, but it’s easy enough to wrap into component libraries. AFAIK it still powers many of the big BI viz tools used today (eg AWS Quicksight).

infecto 2y ago
Look, it’s not “bizarre” to point out that Observable has deeply shaped the modern D3 ecosystem. The issue isn’t that the D3 API has changed, it’s that a huge number of learning resources, examples, and docs have been rebaked into Observable’s reactive notebook style, which, for people not using Observable, adds a ton of indirection and mental overhead. You might not notice it if you already know D3 inside and out, but for newcomers, it’s a bit of a turnoff. It’s ok if you like it though! And no, this isn’t about “blindly copying and pasting.” It’s about people wanting to use D3 without having to learn an entirely different execution environment. That’s a reasonable boundary to set, especially when time and focus are finite. 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.
- abtinf 2y ago
  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.
  - edoceo 2y ago
    Same story here, landed on Apache Echart (it seems, like many others)
- jwilber 2y ago
  "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!
  - infecto 2y ago
    Appreciate the lengthy response, but I want to clarify a few things since I think my original point keeps getting mischaracterized. First, the italics. You opened with “This is a very bizarre take”—emphasis on very—which, whether you intended it or not, sets a smug tone. It’s the kind of rhetorical move that shuts down discussion before it starts. I’m not saying this to nitpick style, but to point out how quickly this moved from a discussion about tooling to a dismissal of my viewpoint. It is an easy tell the person writing gives away when they use it like you do. Now, to the substance: yes, the D3 API is technically independent of Observable. But in practice, Observable is now the primary medium through which new users encounter and learn D3. The official examples, new documentation, and most teaching material are embedded in the Observable environment, which introduces its own model of reactivity, syntax, and execution. That’s not a minor detail, it’s a real obstacle for people who just want to understand and use D3 in plain JavaScript. Your PyTorch/mkdocs analogy completely misses the mark. Mkdocs is a static site generator. It doesn’t change the code you’re learning—Observable, on the other hand, does. You can’t meaningfully learn D3 from many of these new examples without understanding how Observable cells work. That’s a tight coupling, and one I don’t think should be hand-waved away. “Just use AI to convert the notebook” is a non-answer. It assumes everyone is okay with outsourcing understanding to a black box just to get a usable snippet. That’s exactly the kind of indirection I’m objecting to in the first place. Lastly, yes, I’ve set a personal boundary: I don’t want to buy into an ecosystem that made a choice I don’t support. That’s not a call to boycott, it’s just me saying, this direction doesn’t work for me. If that’s enough to dismiss my view as bizarre, then I’m not sure what kind of discussion is even possible here.
- WuxiFingerHold 2y ago
  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.
- gaws 2y ago
  > You can use as many italics as you want Wait. This is actually hilarious.
9dev 2y ago
Ah, the good old "you’re not allowed to criticise open source projects, because they’re open source!" Observable is cool when you want to build data notebooks. 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. The problem is that D3 resources mix D3 documentation with demos of D3 itself, and demos of Observable, into a single, inseparable combination. Nobody would complain were those three things separate resources; alas, they’re not. Every time someone raises this issue, they are shot down by people like you, with the same nonsensical argument—just because the maintainers write cool demos in a fringe datavis DSL, that doesn’t automatically mean it’s helpful for the 99% use case of rendering charts in normal apps.
- jwilber 2y ago
  "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 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 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).
mkl 2y ago
> it’s odd to attack observable since everything they put out is fully open-source Really? They've finally open-sourced the notebook editor? I can't find it on their GitHub. The long-proprietary notebook editor is a big part of people's objections to Observable.
- gaws 2y ago
  > They've finally open-sourced the notebook editor? They didn't because it's literally their core business.

infecto 2y ago

Look, it’s not “bizarre” to point out that Observable has deeply shaped the modern D3 ecosystem. The issue isn’t that the D3 API has changed, it’s that a huge number of learning resources, examples, and docs have been rebaked into Observable’s reactive notebook style, which, for people not using Observable, adds a ton of indirection and mental overhead. You might not notice it if you already know D3 inside and out, but for newcomers, it’s a bit of a turnoff. It’s ok if you like it though! And no, this isn’t about “blindly copying and pasting.” It’s about people wanting to use D3 without having to learn an entirely different execution environment. That’s a reasonable boundary to set, especially when time and focus are finite. 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.

abtinf 2y ago
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.
- edoceo 2y ago
  Same story here, landed on Apache Echart (it seems, like many others)
jwilber 2y ago
"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!
- infecto 2y ago
  Appreciate the lengthy response, but I want to clarify a few things since I think my original point keeps getting mischaracterized. First, the italics. You opened with “This is a very bizarre take”—emphasis on very—which, whether you intended it or not, sets a smug tone. It’s the kind of rhetorical move that shuts down discussion before it starts. I’m not saying this to nitpick style, but to point out how quickly this moved from a discussion about tooling to a dismissal of my viewpoint. It is an easy tell the person writing gives away when they use it like you do. Now, to the substance: yes, the D3 API is technically independent of Observable. But in practice, Observable is now the primary medium through which new users encounter and learn D3. The official examples, new documentation, and most teaching material are embedded in the Observable environment, which introduces its own model of reactivity, syntax, and execution. That’s not a minor detail, it’s a real obstacle for people who just want to understand and use D3 in plain JavaScript. Your PyTorch/mkdocs analogy completely misses the mark. Mkdocs is a static site generator. It doesn’t change the code you’re learning—Observable, on the other hand, does. You can’t meaningfully learn D3 from many of these new examples without understanding how Observable cells work. That’s a tight coupling, and one I don’t think should be hand-waved away. “Just use AI to convert the notebook” is a non-answer. It assumes everyone is okay with outsourcing understanding to a black box just to get a usable snippet. That’s exactly the kind of indirection I’m objecting to in the first place. Lastly, yes, I’ve set a personal boundary: I don’t want to buy into an ecosystem that made a choice I don’t support. That’s not a call to boycott, it’s just me saying, this direction doesn’t work for me. If that’s enough to dismiss my view as bizarre, then I’m not sure what kind of discussion is even possible here.
WuxiFingerHold 2y ago
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.
gaws 2y ago
> You can use as many italics as you want Wait. This is actually hilarious.

9dev 2y ago

Ah, the good old "you’re not allowed to criticise open source projects, because they’re open source!" Observable is cool when you want to build data notebooks. 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. The problem is that D3 resources mix D3 documentation with demos of D3 itself, and demos of Observable, into a single, inseparable combination. Nobody would complain were those three things separate resources; alas, they’re not. Every time someone raises this issue, they are shot down by people like you, with the same nonsensical argument—just because the maintainers write cool demos in a fringe datavis DSL, that doesn’t automatically mean it’s helpful for the 99% use case of rendering charts in normal apps.

jwilber 2y ago
"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 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 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).

mkl 2y ago

> it’s odd to attack observable since everything they put out is fully open-source Really? They've finally open-sourced the notebook editor? I can't find it on their GitHub. The long-proprietary notebook editor is a big part of people's objections to Observable.

gaws 2y ago
> They've finally open-sourced the notebook editor? They didn't because it's literally their core business.