[Sammi]

I work primarily in projects that use js and I mostly don't see the point in working with json in other tools than js.

I have tried jq a little bit, but learning jq is learning a new thing, which is healthy, but it also requires time and energy, which is not always available.

When I want to munge some json I use js... because that is what js in innately good at and it's what I already know. A little js script that does stdin/file read and then JSON.parse, and then map and filter some stuff, and at the end JSON.stringify to stdout/file does the job 100% of the time in my experience.

And I can use a debugger or put in console logs when I want to debug. I don't know how to debug jq or sql, so when I'm stuck I end up going for js which I can debug.

Are there js developers who reach for jq when you are already familiar with js? Is it because you are already strong in bash and terminal usage? I think I get why you would want to use sql if you are already experienced in sql. Sql is common and made for data munging. Jq however is a new dsl when I don't see the limitation of existing js or sql.

[wwader]

I do quite a lot of adhoc/exploratory programming to query and transform data then jq is very convenient as it works very well with "deep" data structures and the language itself it very composable.

To debug in jq you can use the debug function to prints to stderr, ex: "123 | debug | ..." or "{a:123, b:456} | debug({a}) | ... " only prints value of a "{a:123}"