4 ms·

Clearly there’s a very real need for binary data formats, or we wouldn’t have them. For one, it’s much more space efficient. Does the author know how much stora

Clearly there’s a very real need for binary data formats, or we wouldn’t have them. For one, it’s much more space efficient. Does the author know how much storage cost in 1985? Or how slow computers were? If I time traveled back to 1985 and told corporate to adopt CSV because it’d be useful in 50 years when unearthing old customer records I’d be laughed out of the cigar lounge.

burnt-resistor 1y ago
[flagged]
- tliltocatl 1y ago
  It's often too late to overhaul you systems when performance becomes a serve limiting factor. By that point things like data format are already set in stone. The whole "premature optimization" was originally about peep-hole stuff, not architecture-defining concerns, and it's really sad to see it misapplied to "lets store everything as json and use O(n²) everywhere and hopefully it will be someone else's problem".
graemep 1y ago
Except there are many things for which we used human readable formats in the 1980s for which we use binary formats now - HTTP headers, for example. CSV was definitely in wide use back then. Text formats are compressible.
- self_awareness 1y ago
  Text formats are compressible because they waste a lot of space to encode data. Instead of the space of 256 values per byte they use maybe 100.
  - graemep 1y ago
    I assumed that is common knowledge here. The point is that you need to take that into account when discussing storage requirements.
    - self_awareness 1y ago
      So I guess it's also a common knowledge that a compressed stream needs to be uncompressed in order to use it. So argumenting that compressed stream takes smaller space on a floppy disk doesn't mean that it will also take the same amount of bytes in memory. Also I'd argue if HTTP1 can be treated as a pure text format, since it requires \r and \n as EOL markers, even on systems that only use \n. Strict binary requirements like this shouldn't be needed if it was a text protocol.

burnt-resistor 1y ago

[flagged]

tliltocatl 1y ago
It's often too late to overhaul you systems when performance becomes a serve limiting factor. By that point things like data format are already set in stone. The whole "premature optimization" was originally about peep-hole stuff, not architecture-defining concerns, and it's really sad to see it misapplied to "lets store everything as json and use O(n²) everywhere and hopefully it will be someone else's problem".

graemep 1y ago

Except there are many things for which we used human readable formats in the 1980s for which we use binary formats now - HTTP headers, for example. CSV was definitely in wide use back then. Text formats are compressible.

self_awareness 1y ago
Text formats are compressible because they waste a lot of space to encode data. Instead of the space of 256 values per byte they use maybe 100.
- graemep 1y ago
  I assumed that is common knowledge here. The point is that you need to take that into account when discussing storage requirements.
  - self_awareness 1y ago
    So I guess it's also a common knowledge that a compressed stream needs to be uncompressed in order to use it. So argumenting that compressed stream takes smaller space on a floppy disk doesn't mean that it will also take the same amount of bytes in memory. Also I'd argue if HTTP1 can be treated as a pure text format, since it requires \r and \n as EOL markers, even on systems that only use \n. Strict binary requirements like this shouldn't be needed if it was a text protocol.