CSV parsing is not as bad as it sounds and can be a decent fizzbuzzy interview question.
The real problem with CSV is the lack of vision of data formats in general. Inside your programming language you need to say that you want to read a CSV? You need to import a different library and change both the parse code and your consumption code to instead do JSON? You need to change everything to use futures in order to stream the results? Are you out of your damn mind?
So now that disk space is so cheap it would make sense for any file format to just begin with a single few-kilobytes line that defines the parser for the coming file. Could be sandboxed, WASM-y or something, could be made printable of course... Sure, it might not be possible to get the full SQLite library in there but you could at least make it free to switch between JSON and BSON and CSV without having to recompile the software or force someone to design modular file input systems. Somehow the only flexible containers that hold different data structures are video container formats that do not care about what codec you used. They "get it"— can the rest of us?
The real problem with CSV is the lack of vision of data formats in general. Inside your programming language you need to say that you want to read a CSV? You need to import a different library and change both the parse code and your consumption code to instead do JSON? You need to change everything to use futures in order to stream the results? Are you out of your damn mind?
So now that disk space is so cheap it would make sense for any file format to just begin with a single few-kilobytes line that defines the parser for the coming file. Could be sandboxed, WASM-y or something, could be made printable of course... Sure, it might not be possible to get the full SQLite library in there but you could at least make it free to switch between JSON and BSON and CSV without having to recompile the software or force someone to design modular file input systems. Somehow the only flexible containers that hold different data structures are video container formats that do not care about what codec you used. They "get it"— can the rest of us?