[chongli]

There's a lot of benefits to adding some structure to text.

There are benefits, true, but there are also potentially serious drawbacks. Chief among them, I would hazard, is the risk that we get locked into a format that didn't anticipate a (completely unknown) future need and we have to go back and rewrite everything again.

The beauty of text's lack of structure is that people are free to interpret it any way they please.

[ziftface]

I keep seeing comments like this one, but just as you can parse textual data into something more structured, like the examples in the post, you can also print the structured data as text. So the tools that use and generate structured data are no less compatible because it's easy to go back and forth between the formats at will. You're not losing anything with this approach.

[sverige]

> You're not losing anything with this approach.

True, but you are adding something. And if you add things you don't really need, it becomes plain old cruft.

Like the others above, I understand the urge to make some things simpler by adding complexity, but for the long haul I'm convinced it's better to keep tools simple and add any needed complexity to the code you're writing (whether it's shell scripts or anything else). And then document the complexity so future you or some poor stranger can understand why the hell you did that in the first place.

But I don't look forward to reading comments like "X was deprecated so we're converting these tables back to text streams so they can be converted back to Y properly."

[amaccuish]

But isn't that precisely the problem? A lot of people are unsatisfied with the current solution which doesn't lend itself to a particular goal?

Aren't we now locked into a format (plain text) which is now becoming more and more of a pain (what type is this? is this text related to this other text?) and we're now having to go back to old utilities and add --json?