Observable Notebooks Data Loaders (opens in new tab)

The notebooks aren't evaluated in reverse, but rather in the order they need to be to get the final results. Observable builds a DAG, similar to Marimo. You can put cells in any order you'd like.

I think that in all the notebook solutions I've seen that allow this, a culture emerges where the "final result" is put at the top so that you can find it easily and interact with it as a user. The actual development process involves writing stuff top down and then re-ordering it for use.

You can just write your observable notebook from top to bottom if you want. The reactive cells just means that you don't have to, and it will still work.

Thanks for pointing this out! The attention to exploration is why I enjoy using Observable so I am glad that this will be paired with the framework features to get us Notebooks 2.0

It's possible to make (via polyglot JS/HTML files[1]) apps that offer both a command-line interface that can be invoked with NodeJS (or other JS-ish runtime) or can be opened in the browser (via double-click, the browser's File Open dialog, or by just typing the file path into the location bar) if the right version of NodeJS isn't available (or for people who just don't want to give carte blanche to run outside the safety of the browser sandbox to programs downloaded from the internet, given the poor track record of NPM-based program creators/maintainers to stay on top of their dependencies).

A ton more programs, especially one-shot programs that operate on a single batch input (e.g. a directory of files) and then generate some output—like a ZIP copy of the files for your static site—should offer this but unfortunately don't. At best they'll put out an Electron app for cross-platform compatibility, but it doesn't sidestep the problem of granting overbroad capabilities to NPM modules (or the massive memory footprint). Then, in this case, there's Observable Desktop, which as a Mac-only app, falls short even of that mark.

1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44229684>

i believe they're referring to the observable desktop[0] macos app, a gui client for notebook kit[1]. the cli works great, fwiw!

[0]: https://observablehq.com/notebook-kit/kit) [1]: https://observablehq.com/notebook-kit/desktop