[rob05c]

> As far as JSON

I wasn't clear on that example. If he's talking about CSV, there's nothing wrong with that (though I wouldn't call JSON "bad"). If he's talking about delimiting text with the bell character, yeah, that's ghastly.

> without context

I feel like most of the examples don't have enough context to make a fair judgement.

If it's just a small amount in one place, simple formats like CSV and JSON can easily be parsed, and especially generated, manually. If they're used all over the codebase, manual parsing would create a huge amount of duplicated code. There just isn't enough context.