[coldtea]

>Your comment made me go look up jq (even more than the article did) and the first paragraph of the repo [0] feels like a secret club's secret language.

Or one of the most old standing widespread clubs of computing open standard language :)

"jq is like sed for JSON data - you can use it to slice and filter and map and transform structured data with the same ease that sed, awk, grep and friends let you play with text."

Translation:

JQ is like a (UNIX/POSIX staple command line text-manipulation tool) but specialized for text structured in JSON format. You can use it to extract parts of a JSON document (slice), keep nodes based on some criteria (filter), transform each element in a list of structured data to get a new list with the transformed versions (map), and do that as easily as you can with the sed (basic command line text manipulation program), awk (command line text manipulation program with a full featured text-processing oriented language), grep (command line program to search for strings), and other assorted unix userland programs.