Re:A love letter to the CSV format
by watwut on Thursday March 27, 2025 @11:40AM
(#43494780)
> I mean, right now, the data interchange format between multiple working systems is CSV; think payment systems, inter-bank data interchange, ERP systems, CRM systems, billing systems ... the list goes on.
And there are constant issues arising from that. You basically need a small team to deal with them in every institution that is processing them.
> I just recently had a coffee with a buddy who's a salesman for some enterprise system: of the most common enterprise systems we recently worked with (SAP type things, but on smaller scales), every single one of them had CSV as the standard way to get data between themselves and other systems.
Salesman of enterprise system do not care about issues programmers and clients have. They care about what they can sell to other businessmen. That teams on both sides then waste time and money on troubleshooting is no concern to the salesman. And I am saying that as someone who worked on the enterprise system that consumed a lot of csv. It does not work and process of handling them literally sometimes involved phone calls to admins of other systems. More often then would be sane.
> The number of people uploading excel files to be processed or downloading excel files for local visualistation and processing would floor you.
That is perfectly fine as long as it is a manager downloading data so that he can manually analyze them. It is pretty horrible when those files are then uploaded to other systems.
And there are constant issues arising from that. You basically need a small team to deal with them in every institution that is processing them.
> I just recently had a coffee with a buddy who's a salesman for some enterprise system: of the most common enterprise systems we recently worked with (SAP type things, but on smaller scales), every single one of them had CSV as the standard way to get data between themselves and other systems.
Salesman of enterprise system do not care about issues programmers and clients have. They care about what they can sell to other businessmen. That teams on both sides then waste time and money on troubleshooting is no concern to the salesman. And I am saying that as someone who worked on the enterprise system that consumed a lot of csv. It does not work and process of handling them literally sometimes involved phone calls to admins of other systems. More often then would be sane.
> The number of people uploading excel files to be processed or downloading excel files for local visualistation and processing would floor you.
That is perfectly fine as long as it is a manager downloading data so that he can manually analyze them. It is pretty horrible when those files are then uploaded to other systems.