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There are a number of areas where DTL can be used where jq can't. The obvious ones are that DTL is a library and is therefore usable directly in your own code, both frontend and backend. In terms of the command line, I'm sure advanced users of jq could get almost, if not all of DTL's command line functionality out of jq, that said I think DTL would make it a lot easier. DTL, I think, provides a more approachable syntax, especially when you are doing more than just extracting data as it already exists. The DTL builtins of `grep` `group` are great examples, as are `chain` `derive` and the various set-operations present in DTL. Add to that that DTL is functional in nature and allows you to specify your own transforms as controls to the various functions, you can easily get very sophisticated with your remapping in ways that would be much more difficult (maybe impossible) with jq. In terms of an example, the one most readily available I have got turned into a DTL test (in dtl-expressions-advanced.js in the test suite), which is to perform a soundex search on textual input data. DTL doesn't support soundex natively, but it was trivial to create it with a DTL transform, and because it's json, it can be imported into any transformation object you might need to use it in. And because DTL is a module AND a cli, you can move your transforms back and forth between your code and your command line without re-translation, which I have found to be immensely useful... but YMMV. |