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Anjana: [laughs] That is entirely my understanding. But you don't even just have to troll them. You can actually use it to very nicely take advantage of whatever Ruby ecosystem things you depend on for whatever the task is at hand.
Anjana: Also, what's fun is that we recently in Observable introduced the concept of different cell modes where you can have a mode in HTML or LaTeX, for example, for more academic write-ups that involve a lot of mathematical equations and things like that. And folks, because the internet is so amazing, folks in our community have taken that and hacked it to actually be able to run Python in the browser through a project that essentially runs Python in WebAssembly. So you can then have essentially tiny little Python programs running in your browser. So the intention of Observable is not to support all of the languages in the world. It is to be JavaScript-centric because it is meant to run entirely in your browser.
And I think now there's this awesome movement for more openness around the code used in academic studies and scientific research. And there are amazing projects to host that code and make it reproducible. I mean, GitHub itself is really useful. But I think that's still a muscle that the academic and scientific community is still collectively building. So this is another thing that's so awesome about having everything be beyond the web and whether it's in a Jupyter Notebook that's hosted somewhere on GitHub or on somebody's site or whether it's in an Observable notebook that's hosted on observablehq.com.
Anjana: So Observable...I've worked at Observable since early 2020. It had been in development as a notebook environment for a few years before that. And I think it had been an idea in its creator's mind. So Mike Bostock, who also created D3, I think had had the interactive notebook in-browser prototyping environment in his mind for much longer than that. And it was initially a project called D3 Express. And so, over the years, it morphed into a small three-person team who is building out this product in sort of a beta mode for a couple of years. And then it became a startup officially on the scene with some seed funding, and then Series A in 2019, I believe. And so yeah, it's been around for a few years, and we've had some people making amazing stuff on the platform for the last few years.