We format the data to move it around. It could be hundreds of kilometers or a few nanometers but we always need to encode information somehow. I’ve never found the “El Dorado” of data formats.
Text formats are easy to read by a human but harder and slower to parse.
Binary formats are fast to parse but hard to debug.
XML is a good container but it’s too verbose.
JSON is easy but does not have basic data types.
Serializable formats are not good to keep in memory but specific formats for in-memory operations are not binary compatible with other languages.
The most important thing I learned is: you need to find the right balance between speed, flexibility, compatibility and the human-computer interface.
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