@HatkeshiatorTND @alyastay3547 @nigger @Zergling_man cop out answer.

the hard work of programming is dealing ugly input data you don't like. that's why people are paid to write that code, and why devs who "do it for free" do it for the challenge. Or sometimes...there's a reason that you need to have that data that makes it worth writing.

virtually ALL of the code I wrote as a professional dev / osg ninja was based around dealing with real, physical devices that gave out nonsensical data in formats that weren't lisp, written 'just good enough' to be possible to work. And when we sent our data back to other systems, we often even had to send it back in a very specific xml format(because that's what their devs wanted, due to the libraries they were building on)

obviously if you could re-architect the whole thing lisp/json would better. but we couldn't for a variety of reasons

even getting the systems that we were dealing with that were proprietary to not be proprietary would have been a big win, and we couldn't manage *that* much.
ALL that work has to be done yet.