[marmada]

I see a lot of JQ experts on this thread, so I'll bite the bullet here as a novice.

The purpose of life is not to know JQ. I just want to process the JSON so I can move on and do whatever is actually important. Ideally, I'd just be able to tell GPT-codex to do what I want to do to the JSON in English.

We're not there yet, but in the meantime if there's another tool that allows me to know less in exchange for doing more, I'll gladly use it.

[preferjq]

I completely agree when your goal is GSD just use the tools you have.

When you have time to sharpen the saw come back and dig into the details of how jq and tools like it work and where their limits are. Looking at the jq builtins[1] can be very enlightening

If you get to the point where your goal is to increase your jq skills I'd recommend looking at the jq questions on Stack Overflow and posting your own solution. Contributing a solution to https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Jq is also good.

1- https://github.com/stedolan/jq/blob/master/src/builtin.jq

[boyter]

Same boat here. I ended up finding gron https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron which resolved that issue for me. Now I don't have to look up how to use jq each time I want to quickly find something in some JSON.

[phil294]

This is one of the purposes I think Deno should have been built for: Use JavaScript for oneliners in the command line. We had

    ... | deno xeval '...stdin processing code using special var $'

which was close to xargs in terms of conciseness. Unfortunately, it was removed as being considered "too niche" [1].

[1] https://github.com/denoland/deno/issues/3230

[dotopotoro]

> know less in exchange for doing more

That is very rare event with established tooling.

Most of the time complexity is just shifted around.

[nixpulvis]

No, not ideally.

English descriptions will never be completely unambiguous and unique keys into a JSON data structure. There is a very good reason programming languages (and other forms of languages) exist.