[meepmorp]

The same thing could be said for grep, or really any other utility that can have its functionality reproduced in a programing language.

[eru]

Indeed! Jq is basically something like grep for JSON.

It might actually make sense to embed jq functionality into your favourite language (as a library or so), as it is quite a nice and well-chosen set of functionality.

[preferjq]

I would love to see jq libraries become as common as regex libraries so I could use jq directly in whatever stack or environment I'm working on.