have you taken a look at what the CLI is for? like you mentioned, it's pretty much just a build step! but there are some runtime things basked that are interesting [0]. i just have a watcher listening to file changes to trigger a rebuild. i have no need for real-time queries so just having the current state at build works for my purposes.
if you must know, the product i work on is primarily a data lake. we have our own query language -> i have a fork of the CLI w added support for parsing custom cells. i don't know of any alternatives that give me a notebook so easily!
> running a script to generate a static webpage would drive me insane
possibly web-brained take but i don't mind it much. builds are instant for me, network latency is the only thing i find myself waiting around on.
> Isn't the whole point of a computational notebook to have some kind of integrated GUI
well yea, pretty sure the entire point of the desktop app is to show what you can build atop the new api! this preview is meant to expand the capability of observable within your own custom web app. the original framework was too close to some of the frustrations you mentioned, so they're trying to make it more amorphous :)
deno has been around for a little while, i think some commentators may have taken your responses as satirical because of how often deno shows up in conversations surrounding the web platform. think of deno as a node.js successor, it's a separate javascript runtime; with that, it'll need to compete with node's ecosystem (vast and diverse tooling). the deno company is spearheading that movement by creating things like Deno Deploy and now Fresh. i believe the gist of it is that people were excited about the concepts Deno had been brewing up, and now they're building things that will allow people to actually make use of deno.
so, many people will look at this and say 'how is this different from ___?' and the reality is that for the most part, it's not. that's the point. you're making use of deno to do the same thing you did with node, and hopefully it's a little bit easier and/or more developer friendly.
also fwiw, deno is not really yc-affiliated; the company is backed by Sequoia, Four Rivers Ventures, Rauch Capital, Long Journey Ventures, the Mozilla Corporation, Shasta Ventures, and i think some other angel investors like Nat Friedman (former GitHub CEO).
edit: i just realized you probably meant another company... i believe Slack uses deno in prod, not sure if they're currently hiring. netlify, github, and supabase all use deno as well.
if you must know, the product i work on is primarily a data lake. we have our own query language -> i have a fork of the CLI w added support for parsing custom cells. i don't know of any alternatives that give me a notebook so easily!
> running a script to generate a static webpage would drive me insane
possibly web-brained take but i don't mind it much. builds are instant for me, network latency is the only thing i find myself waiting around on.
> Isn't the whole point of a computational notebook to have some kind of integrated GUI
well yea, pretty sure the entire point of the desktop app is to show what you can build atop the new api! this preview is meant to expand the capability of observable within your own custom web app. the original framework was too close to some of the frustrations you mentioned, so they're trying to make it more amorphous :)
[0] https://github.com/observablehq/notebook-kit/tree/main/src/r...