I think the issue is that CSV parsing is really easy to screw up. You mentioned delimiter choice and escaping, and I’d add header presence/absence to that list.
There are at least 3 knobs to turn every time you want to parse a CSV file. There’s reasonably good tooling around this (for example, Python’s CSV module has 8 parser parameters that let you select stuff), but the fact that you have to worry about these details is itself a problem.
You said “handling data is complicated as much as the world itself is”, and I 100% agree. But the really hard part is understanding what the data means, what it describes. Every second spent on figuring out which CSV parsing option I have to change could be better spent actually thinking about the data.
I am kind of amazed how people nag about having to parse practically a random file.
Having header or not should be specified up front and one should not parse some unknown file because that will always end up with failure.
If you have your own serialization and your own parsing working yeah this will simply work.
But then not pushing back to the user some errors and trying to deal with everything is going to be frustrating because amount of edge cases is almost infinite.
Handling random data is hard, saying it is a CSV and trying to support everything that comes with it is hard.
There are at least 3 knobs to turn every time you want to parse a CSV file. There’s reasonably good tooling around this (for example, Python’s CSV module has 8 parser parameters that let you select stuff), but the fact that you have to worry about these details is itself a problem.
You said “handling data is complicated as much as the world itself is”, and I 100% agree. But the really hard part is understanding what the data means, what it describes. Every second spent on figuring out which CSV parsing option I have to change could be better spent actually thinking about the data.