Hacker News Reader

Comment by refactor_master | Hacker News Reader

Clearly there’s a very real need for binary data formats, or we wouldn’t have them. For one, it’s much more space efficient. Does the author know how much storage cost in 1985? Or how slow computers were?

If I time traveled back to 1985 and told corporate to adopt CSV because it’d be useful in 50 years when unearthing old customer records I’d be laughed out of the cigar lounge.

View on HN

Except there are many things for which we used human readable formats in the 1980s for which we use binary formats now - HTTP headers, for example.

CSV was definitely in wide use back then.

Text formats are compressible.

Text formats are compressible because they waste a lot of space to encode data. Instead of the space of 256 values per byte they use maybe 100.

I assumed that is common knowledge here. The point is that you need to take that into account when discussing storage requirements.

So I guess it's also a common knowledge that a compressed stream needs to be uncompressed in order to use it. So argumenting that compressed stream takes smaller space on a floppy disk doesn't mean that it will also take the same amount of bytes in memory.

Also I'd argue if HTTP1 can be treated as a pure text format, since it requires \r and \n as EOL markers, even on systems that only use \n. Strict binary requirements like this shouldn't be needed if it was a text protocol.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com