[isityettime]

> it's almost a programming language

It is a programming language. That thing you write between single quotation marks when you invoke jq is a program. (And like with other programming languages, it's often useful to write your jq programs to files instead of always writing them inline in the shell.)

I love jq, though. It provides an extremely good language for its task, even if I often have to take a look at the manual when writing an interesting jq program.