I disagree. Binary formats with proper affordances for forwards- and backwards-compatibility (like Protobuf and Cap'n Proto) are great for persistence. Among ma

I disagree. Binary formats with proper affordances for forwards- and backwards-compatibility (like Protobuf and Cap'n Proto) are great for persistence. Among many other points I could make, with large quantities of persistent data, random access is usually important, and text formats are woefully poor at random access. It's true that binary formats present more challenges to "digital archaeology" than text-based formats, but I don't think this is the most important thing to optimize for. Moreover, tools for reading Protobufs are not likely to go away any time soon -- not any more likely than tools for reading MySQL databases or your preferred compression format or your filesystem, all of which are also binary. (Cap'n Proto is perhaps not as deeply-rooted yet, but I'm working on that...) Of course, again, this is a judgment call and there's no way I can prove that my judgment is "correct".