Rubbish. It's possible to have poorly defined text formats just as easily as binary formats. Remind me how to read CSV again? How do I store 64-bit integers in JSON?
Text formats are popular because you don't have to use a special tool to view them. That's the only reason.
> Text formats are popular because you don't have to use a special tool to view them. That's the only reason.
But you need a special tool to get a computer to read them. Seems like not a win. Throw in compression & encryption... and suddenly you need a special tool anyway.
Byte ordering issues are easily addressed by still emitting text, but not converting to a base that differs in a prime factor. Just emit the mantissa and exponent in – say – hexadecimal form and the negative sign bit as a `-`. It avoids all the endianes issues and is trivially converted.
It's a trade-off of CPU usage versus flexibility. It's not surprising that textual serialization formats took off together with managed memory languages.