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Friends don't let friends export to CSV

kaveland.no

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Re: Friends don't let friends export to CSV

#4
> One of the infurating things about the format is that things often break in ways that tools can't pick up and tell you about

This line is emblematic of the paradigm shift LLMs have brought. It’s now easier to build a better tool than change everyone’s behaviour.

> You give up human readable files, but

What are we even doing here.

Re: Friends don't let friends export to CSV

#5
Or export to CSV correctly and test with Excel and/or LibreOffice. Honestly CSV is a very simple, well defined format, that is decades old and is “obvious”. I’ve had far more trouble with various export to excel functions over the years, that have much more complex third-party dependencies to function. Parsing CSV correctly is not hard, you just can’t use split and be done with it. This has been my coding kata in every programming language I’ve touched since I was a teenager learning to code.

Re: Friends don't let friends export to CSV

#8
post #2

I think the sad reality there is that it's become "the" format that users expect, and more importantly, it's what's integrated into the majority of peripheral services and tools. Like JSON.

Yeah, clients always expect CSV (or sometimes XLSX), but if I tell them that I'll send parquet data, they will ask if I'm having a stroke or something because they don't know what is parquet and how could they use it.

CSV is just too simple and "user-friendly".

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