Except that the "comma" was a poor choice for a separator, the CSV is just a plain text that can be trivially parsed from any language or platform. That's its biggest value. There is essentially no format, library, or platform lock-in. JSON comes close to this level of openness and ease, but YAML is already too complicated as a file format.

The notion of a "platform" caught my attention. Funny story: About five years ago, I got a little nostalgic and wanted to retrieve some data from my Atari XL computer (8-bit) from my preteen years. Back then, I created primitive software that showed a map of my village with notable places, like my friends' homes. I was able to transform all the BASIC files (stored on cassette tape) from the Atari computer to my PC using a special "SIO2PC" cable, but the mapping data were still locked in the BASIC files. So I had the idea to create a simple BASIC program that would run in an Atari 8-bit PC emulator, linearize all the coordinates and metadata, and export them as a CSV file. The funny thing is that the 8-bit Atari didn't even use ASCII, but an unusual ATASCII encoding. But it's the same for letters, numbers, and even for the comma. Finally, I got the data and wrote a little Python script to create an SVG map. So yes, CSV forever! :)

And the best thing about CSV is that it is a text file with a standardized, well known, universally shared encoding, so you don't have to guess it when opening a CSV file. Exactly in the same way as any other text file. The next best thing with CSV is that separators are also standardized and never positional, you never have to guess.

Try exporting things from Excel to CSV on a Mac with non-us locale.

Some genius at Microsoft decided the exporting to CSV should follow the locale convention. Which means I get a "semicolon-separated value" file instead of a comma-separated one, unless I change my local to us.

Line breaks are also fun...

JSON has the major annoyance that grep doesn't work well on it. You need tooling to work with JSON.

Arguably, "comma as a separator" is close enough to comma's usage in (many) written languages that it makes it easier for less technical users to interact with CSV.

100%.. xml also worked here too..

YAML is a pain because it has every so slightly different versions, that sometimes don't play nice.

csv or TSV's are almost always portable.

I'd say that is not its biggest issue. The way to escape things is by far its biggest issue, a passwd like \, \", \\ would have been far easier.

What separator would be better?

The comma makes it more human-readable. What separator would you suggest?

|| separated for life