Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by brazzy 112 days ago
> I really don't understand why people think it's a good idea to use csv.

Because it's easy to understand. Non-technical people understand it. There is tremendous value in that, and that it's underspecified with ugly edge cases doesn't change that.

1 comments

And you get the under reporting of COVID information in the UK as they passed around CSV files with too many rows for the tools they used.

An interchnage format needs to include information showing that you have all the data - e.g. a hash or the number of rows - or JSON/XML/s-expressions having closing symbols to match the start.