Comment by killerstorm
2 days ago
I'd say another UNIX-y thing - "C is good enough" - is part of the problem. C makes programming painful which results in all sorts of hacks.
E.g. in Pascal you can can define a record and then defined file of record to have typed I/O. I.e. it comes with built-in serialization format supported by compiler. Not a good one - but perhaps a step in a good direction.
OTOH C people starving for serialization often believe that `struct` byte layout made by a specific version of a compiler is a serialization format - a view not endorsed by the standard.
Pascal's record typed files have the exact same problems regarding endianness and word size as directly writing structs to files in C, so I don't see how they're any better. They're also a complete deadend and unusable for pretty much any file format from the last 40 years+, since you can't even handle a header or magic bytes at the start.