CSV: The Format Nobody Designed

By Design — Episode 02 No specification. No schema. No data types. No standard encoding. No committee. No owner. No version number. In 1972, IBM's Fortran compiler started accepting comma-separated values as input. Nobody wrote a design document. Nobody proposed a standard. Someone needed to move data from one place to another, separated values by commas, and it worked. That was the entire specification. Thirty-three years later, Yakov Shafranovich wrote RFC 4180 to formalise what was already everywhere. The format was faster than the standardisation. The Complaint "CSV is not a real format. No types, no schema, no validation. One misplaced comma and your import breaks. One semicolon-delimited file from Germany and your pipeline explodes. It is amateur hour in a text file." Every data engineer has said this. Most of them said it today. The Decision Nobody decided. That is the decision. No committee means no politics. No schema means no version conflicts. No types means every system on