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by AlphaSite 617 days ago
I think for certain types of data manipulation and querying it’s notable more succinct, sql with CTEs is a little better but still far more verbose than data piping.
1 comments

A reply by s.o. who sides with your (potentially unpopular) opinion. With all due respect to DSL languages, IMHO only few people can get on this APL-level of abstraction and cryptic choice for APIs..., and would have the nerves to write it.

From learning perspective JQ seems much more difficult than RegEX for example, its learning curve is potentially steeper than that of CSS and XPATH, which are other examples for querying tree-like-structs. While LLMs are welcome to write it (the jq) for me, my work has relatively little JSON transformations, and for the most part handling these in python/js/perl is okay as.

Stating all this with much fascination for the JQ language itself, as technology, but not as a tool that I find the need for on a daily basis. Besides for me it is much more easier to feed and transform data into Postgres (or even SQLite, which can also be challenging), rather than crunch it w/pandas or R where you can also find fourth generation language capabilities, but performance lags.