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Excel is ubiquitous and makes csv easy for humans to read. Machines do the 99.99% of the time that things are working. The .01% when humans need to get in the
by xupybd 4y ago
Excel is ubiquitous and makes csv easy for humans to read.
Machines do the 99.99% of the time that things are working. The .01% when humans need to get in the loop is when something goes wrong and life is better when you can read the data to figure out what went wrong. JSON is amazing for this. CSV not so much but it's still better than a binary format.
Machine efficiency is not the most valuable metric. Machines are built for human use. The easier a system is for humans to use the better. Even if it's orders of magnitude less efficient.
- imtringued 4y agoExcel doesn't make CSV easy to read. Type information has to be communicated out of band with CSV. If you want to view the data in Excel just use xlsx files. Compared to CSV it is a joy to work with.
- wiredfool 4y agoExcel does things to CSV data that shouldn’t be done. Encodings are troublesome. (See ftfy, a miracle library for fixing them) Everything might be a date. Even genes. Leading zeros get dropped. Even when significant. (Like routing numbers) Long numeric strings get turned into scientific notation. (Like account numbers)