Totally randomly I came across a paper that directly addresses this, The Next 700 Data Description Languages[0]. Today, many programmers tackle the challenge

Totally randomly I came across a paper that directly addresses this, The Next 700 Data Description Languages[0]. Today, many programmers tackle the challenge of ad hoc data by writing scripts in a language like PERL. Unfortunately, this process is slow, tedious, and unreliable. Error checking and recovery in these scripts is often minimal or nonexistent because when present, such error code swamps the main-line computation. The program itself is often unreadable by anyone other than the original authors (and usually not even them in a month or two) and consequently cannot stand as documentation for the format. Processing code often ends up intertwined with parsing code, making it difficult to reuse the parsing code for different analyses. Hence, in general, software produced in this way is not the high-quality, reliable, efficient and maintainable code one should demand. [0] https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~dpw/papers/ddc-jacm.pdf https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~dpw/papers/ddc-jacm.pdf (pdf)