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"In favour of what?", that is the matter. CSV is a format more for humans and less for machines, but that is the use case: a format that is good enough to be compiled by humans and read by machines. At the moment there aren't many alternatives.
I think this issue can be bypassed if a better format such as Arrow or Parquet can be used in Excel.
Surely the successor should be SQLite. Tabular data like CSV, easy to view on different mediums, free and open source, single file databases. It has to be this, right?
1) A truly open format is available and accessible. Csvs are textfiles. There is no system around that cannot open a textfile. If the format is binary or requires patents or whatever, then it's a non-starter.
2) Applications have a speed increase from using csvs. To wit, I loved csvs because often they finish preparing much faster than a "formatted" output in excel, etc. and sometimes I just want to see the numbers, not have everything colored or weird features like merged cells in excel, etc.
3) The new format should not be grossly larger than the one it is replacing. Extracts in Excel format are orders of a magnitude larger than csv in filesize. This affects run-time to prepare the extract, open it (memory constraints, etc.)
Is there truly a problem? The author is not forced to use csvs.
As long as it is text-based. At least you can actually look at a CSV and see what is going (wrong), as well as use all the text tools we have. Not that there aren't problems as the article points out. But some binary file based on the whims of a proprietary program...no thanks.
More correctly titled, "I Don't Like CSV".
"I Cannot Fathom A Use Case For CSV So I Would Like To Ban Everyone From Using It For Any Reason"
The only appropriate replacement for CSV would be a better defined CSV that gave hard requirements for things like field quoting
It's probably not news to anyone who works with data that CSVs are inferior to other file formats like parquet. I think the valuable insight here is that there needs to be a meme / movement that CSV is bad or deprecated. That's what's actually going to put the nails in its coffin, not private griping from developers when they get CSVs. I'm all for it. Down with CSV :)
If I'm trying to make an exportable format for a data logger with an SD card running on an ARM microcontroller, it doesn't get much easier than CSV. Sure, I could save space by rolling my own binary format, but then I have to provide a PC application to read it (and realistically, the user is probably just going to want that application to dump to a CSV anyway!).
I agree that for many use cases there are much better alternatives, but one of the reasons CSV is so popular is because it's so simple. It shouldn't be used for multi-gigabyte datasets, but for many simple use cases it works great.
“ I’m not going to advocate for any one successor file format here, but there are certainly a lot of contenders. The big data ecosystem gave us formats like Avro, Parquet, and Arrow that are widely used as an intermediate representation when transferring data between systems. HDF51 is widely used in the scientific computing community.” Xkcd: https://m.xkcd.com/927/