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> JSON is extremely difficult to parse correctly ... in Bourne shell or in AWK.

Sorry for the misquote, but does it get to the heart of your objection?

I'm torn here. On the one hand I want to say "Those are not languages one typically writes parsers in," but that's a really muddled argument:

1. People "parse" things often in bash/awk because they have to -- because bash etc deal in unstructured data.

2. Maybe "reasonable" languages should be trivially parseable so we can do it in Bash (etc).

I'm kinda torn. On the one hand bash is unreasonably effective, on the other I want data types to be opaque so people don't even try to parse them... would love to hear arguments though.

arghwhat
You definitely shouldn't write a parser for anything in bash.

If you want to deal with JSON, I'd recommend jq as an easy manipulation tool.

Annatar
I wrote Bourne shell and both of you assumed bash. Horrid state of affairs in today’s IT. All hail Linux hegemony!

And AWK, if it’s not easily parsable with the language specifically designed for parsing data, something is wrong with that data.

Annatar
Shell and AWK programs have fewest dependencies, are extremely light on resources’ consumption and are extremely fast. When someone’s program emits JSON because the author assumed that programs which ingest that data will also be JavaScript programs, that’s a really bad assumption. It would force the consumer of that data to replicate the environment. This goes against core UNIX principles, as discussed at length in “The art of UNIX programming” book. It’s a rookie mistake to make.
nnq
> It would force the consumer of that data to replicate the environment.

It won't, because JSON is a standard. Imperfect like all standards but practically good enough. And "plain text" just means "an undefined syntax that I have to mostly guess". And nobody "programs" in bash or awk anymore. The "standard scripting languages" for all sane devs are Python or Ruby (and some Perl legacy) and parsing JSON in them is trivial.

The "UNIX philosophy" was a cancerous bad idea anyway and now it's thankfully being eaten alive by its own children, so time to... rejoice?!

EDIT+: Also, if I feel truly lazy/evil (like in "something I'll only in this JS project"), I would use something much much less standard than JSON, like JSON-5 (https://github.com/json5/json5), which will practically truly force all consumers to use JS :P

fao_
The standard for plain text output in the terminal is and has always been TSV.
nnq
...and how does one do nested/tree-like data in TSV? One doesn't, only just ad-hoc invents something akin to sexps or json but unstandardized. Real-world data rarely has a natural fit for "tabl
fao_
How many standard UNIX programs do you know that output tree data?

And almost always you can find an alternative to non-tree-based representation without having to reinvent sexprs. Look at how ps represents the process tree, for example.

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