[ZeroGravitas]

Often when writing scripts, I'm chaining tools together, e.g. using git to find a thing in a specific commit, using curl to grab something from the web, decoding some json, maybe unzipping a file.

I've never really found any language that feels good for that kind of thing, there's definately a middle ground where it's getting too much for bash, but jumping to a language loses too much at the initial conversion to make it feel worth it until you are well past the point where your future self will think you should have made the switch.

Some languages have things like backticks in php to inter-operate but it's still not great experience to mix between them. For my own little things I'm currently looking at fish, but bash is omnipresent.

This tool seems to delay that point even further, as currently dealing with generating json is definately a pain point (whereas manipulating it in jq is often really good).

But if anyone can point to good examples of this transition in python then I'd be very interested.

edit: jq is more powerful than I thought for creating json, see https://spin.atomicobject.com/2021/06/08/jq-creating-updatin...

[bb88]

Typically if you have bash you have a bunch of other utilities installed too.

The problem with python here is that while python-sh might be nice, you have to install any extra libraries you need with it, and that's not a trivial problem for installing scripts into prod.

Xonsh is better since you kind of get both the benefits of python and a shell like language, but frankly it's broken in a number of ways still. I use it daily, but hopefully you don't need to ctrl-c out of something since signal handling is iffy at best. It is kind of nice to be able to import python directly on the command line and use it as python though...

[Corrado]

Thank you for pointing out that jq can create JSON! I use jq all the time for working with the AWS CLI and a big pain point has always been sending JSON. If you don't know, the AWS CLI depends on JSON arguments for quite a few common tasks, and the JSON needed can be quite lengthy.

Up until now I've been creating temp JSON files to feed the commands and I thought jo would be a great tool to make this easier. Now that I know jq can also create JSON, I'll just use that instead.