Some of the most useful tools are the simplest. I would argue that simplicity is often why those tools are the most useful.
The humble .csv file is a good example of this. It may even, other than the question of character encoding, be one of the only things nearly all programmers can agree on. It’s almost up there with “bytes have eight bits.”
.CSV files, named for the traditional file extension dating back to the days of DOS, are just about as simple a data format as there is. CSV stands for Comma Separated Values — and that’s just what these files are. Raw data, split into columns by commas and into rows by CR/LF combinations (okay, this varies by system, too.)
Although .csv files aren’t as flexible or self-documenting as modern formats such as JSON, they are both (generally) human-readable and very simple to programatically create and parse. Practically anything that works with data can export them, so they have become a significant lingua franca of data analysis.
It’s not as flashy as XML, but there’s something to be said for a format that’s easily readable by desktops, microcontrollers, and humans.
