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Comment by kabouseng | Hacker News Reader

Its because "reality has a surprising amount of detail". It is actually the rare occurrence where a simple solution solves a complex problem. I link an excellent article that has been posted on HN multiple times, that explains exactly this.[1] (not mine)

[1] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

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This is very apparent in my work right now, as well as "all models are wrong, some models are useful".

I'm parsing some "simple" CSVs into a DB, but I have to keep the concrete representation intact for another purpose. The DB format will be similar to the CSV format, but can't be quite the same. I would've figured this would take a day or two (I've written many parsers before), but the amount of details I have to consider has lead me to circle back to this problem for a long time.

If we used ascii delimited values none of this would be a problem. The amount of effort spent on csv must be close to a million man years and all because we want to edit the files with a text editor without a special mode.

The files are CSV-adjacent, I should say. The issue here isn't the delimiter in fact, it's the fact that the format differs slightly between files, even within the same project. That, and the mismatch with the SQL DB format I want.

With the predefined ascii delimiters there is no difference between formats, because you can't choose anything but the dimiters ascii gives you.

After rereading the post I realize that the op was talking about the schema of the files rather than the adhoc nature of trying to decode escape characters.

Ascii delimiters will not save you there.

Not sure if it's just me, as I'm relatively new to the field, but I notice a surprising amount of people assume that the details in programming have already been made intuitive to them, and they use this "experience" to push ideas that are at odds with other domain specific details. To me, maybe this is what the author means by "stuck"?

At any rate, great read.

But software is not "reality" in that sense. For example, software is deterministic and reproducible (if you dont fuck that up).

I relate more to the comment in GP's article:

> If you’re a programmer, you might think that the fiddliness of programming is a special feature of programming, but really it’s that everything is fiddly, but you only notice the fiddliness when you’re new, and in programming you do new things more often.

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