I'm pretty sure we've had Observable (https://observablehq.com) on this Slack before (at least I hope so), but I want to bring it up again. It's a js-based live computational notebook similar to jupyter notebooks, but with automatic recalculation (like spreadsheets). Using js as the programming language means that computations can run client-side, with makes it trivial to get started and publish notebooks. I've created a medium-sized notebook over the last two days (https://observablehq.com/@fkohlgrueber/warming-stripes) and really liked it. Some things are a little weird, but it works surprisingly well even though it is built on top of js (which was never designed for this kind of execution model). What do you think about this project? Is this a good step towards end-user-programming?

my favorite part is actually clicking the link in the import statement at the bottom and seeing basically a library of literate code for useful interactive doc building blocks, displayed as an interactive doc: https://observablehq.com/@jashkenas/inputs

meta comment: I tried to search our history for "observable" while worrying it may be out of our search history frontier, and found.. a #CEXED56UR thread on searching past the search history frontier using an Observable notebook. https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/CEXED56UR/p1560374046002600?thread_ts=1560374046.002600&cid=CEXED56UR

I think it is really interesting how similar Observable is to visual, graph-based, programming tools: “In the future, we plan to visualize the computation graph in the Observable editor so you can see how data flows through your notebook.” https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/how-observable-runs It might be a good thing that the main UI looks like a Jupyter notebook — it hides well its data flow underpinnings 🙂.

I just started working at Observable last week! Definitely interesting to hear what people think

@ballingt Congrats! What are you working on there? (Assuming that isn't too confidential a topic.)

Mostly learning JavaScript and Postgres atm 🙂