Simon Willison’s Weblog

Tom MacWright: Observable Notebooks 2.0. Observable announced Observable Notebooks 2.0 last week - the latest take on their JavaScript notebook technology, this time with an open file format and a brand new macOS desktop app.

Tom MacWright worked at Observable during their first iteration and here provides thoughtful commentary from an insider-to-outsider perspective on how their platform has evolved over time.

I particularly appreciated this aside on the downsides of evolving your own not-quite-standard language syntax:

Notebook Kit and Desktop support vanilla JavaScript, which is excellent and cool. The Observable changes to JavaScript were always tricky and meant that we struggled to use off-the-shelf parsers, and users couldn't use standard JavaScript tooling like eslint. This is stuff like the viewof operator which meant that Observable was not JavaScript. [...] Sidenote: I now work on Val Town, which is also a platform based on writing JavaScript, and when I joined it also had a tweaked version of JavaScript. We used the @ character to let you 'mention' other vals and implicitly import them. This was, like it was in Observable, not worth it and we switched to standard syntax: don't mess with language standards folks!