[jameshart]

The ‘nearly’ Turing complete is something I wonder about. It feels like jq might have some limitations - transformations it can’t do, due to some inherent limitation of how it handles scope or data flow. The esoteric syntax makes it hard to determine sometimes whether what you are attempting is actually possible.

As soon as jq scripts reach a certain level of complexity I break out to writing a node script instead.

And given how rapidly jq scripts acquire complexity, that level is pretty low. One nested lookup, and I’m out.

[nonlogical]

jq does often feels like a code golf language. I would say it does have some of those Perl one liner vibes, that is to say that it is often a write-only language.

Also the ‘nearly’ part is because I don’t remember if it has infinite loops or if it is more like Starlark and thus decidable. I do have vague recollections of causing infinite cycles in JQ, it quite as well could be entirely Turing complete.

So far I have not found a single task that JQ was incapable of. And I have abused it pretty bad on my spare time =], for intellectual challenge.

[cryptonector]

jq lacks coroutines, which means some tasks can be hard to accomplish in jq. It's still a very powerful language, and it is Turing complete, not just nearly.