I'm not really a JavaScript person either, but that hasn't been the worst problem with observable. Tools like vega-lite and importable tools from other notebooks really reduces the amount of code I need to write. Like, I'm not writing d3 code for hours for a simple choropleth. What makes it easier is that I can query objects using SQL rather than lengthy JavaScript code.
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I'm not really a JavaScript person either, but that hasn't been the worst problem with observable. Tools like vega-lite and importable tools from other notebooks really reduces the amount of code I need to write. Like, I'm not writing d3 code for hours for a simple choropleth. What makes it easier is that I can query objects using SQL rather than lengthy JavaScript code.