I disagree. The cases where I would do so voluntarily are limited, but I've been forced to deal with binary data on several occasions. HDF5 is also my goto if I

I disagree. The cases where I would do so voluntarily are limited, but I've been forced to deal with binary data on several occasions. HDF5 is also my goto if I am in control, but sometimes you're given data that is only in some obscure binary format. Unless you were implying that such work is best done in another language. I can buy that, but I found Python to be a convenient choice for it.