Please stop using Excel-like formats to exchange data

win-vector.com

4 pointsjmount3 comments

Please stop with arbitrary recentism, and stop campaigning against commonly-used data formats. Instead, use better tools which trivially read/write/convert whatever-to-whatever. Be a tool user. Make the data into whatever shape you want, and publish whatever you want.

I'm quite annoyed that Google Docs was announced to stop exporting to frequently used formats. I've said it before https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4577966 "Recentism trashes bidirectional accessibility. Stable standards are not de facto useless." "Stop with the petulant feature gutting. Who are you trying to impress?"

Some formats are just bad and don't have enough tools, despite their historic popularity. Excel export is one of them- there are not a lot of libraries that reliably read it in all cases, and it isn't even exported properly in many cases (so good luck fixing that). Also changing formats like Apache Hadoop did allows things like sub-linear time (on the master node) file splitting- which is not possible if you are hunting arbitrarily far for matching quotes. So superficially it may look like the opposite of opposing broken formats is "recentism", but there are often good reasons to start over with better trade-offs and better implementations.

Pleases -> Please (sorry about that)

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