Appendix C — Stray Thoughts

Putting the code together, I have had a lot of stray thoughts that I want to get into the text. I’m thinking to collect them here, then remove them as they get expressed more concretely elsewhere in this book.

Shiny and Observable are more opinionated than Dash.

Shiny and Observable manage the reactive graph for you; Dash makes you spell it out explicitly.

Being more opinionated lets you code more concisely. Being less opinionated gives you more flexibility in what you create, at the price of more code.

Shiny lets you store the state at the server; Dash and Observable do not.

Dash and Observable use React under the hood.

Shiny and Dash both offer a UI/server framework; in Observable, it’s all notebook.

Observable supports (and encourages) the idea of importing functions from other published notebooks.