I'm pretty good with regular expressions. I have spent a lot of time trying to get familiar with jq. The problem is that I never use it outside of parsing JSON files, yet I use regular expressions all over the place: on the command line, in Python and Javascript and Java code. They are widely applicable. Their syntax is terse, but relatively small.
jq has never come naturally. Every time I try to intuit how to do something, my intuition fails. This is despite having read its man page a dozen times or more, and consulted it even more frequently than that.
I've spent 20+ years on the Unix command line. I know my way around most of it. I can use sed and awk and perl to great effect. But I just can't seem to get jq to stick.
Aside, but there's a lot of times when "I know jq can do this, but I forget exactly how, let me find it in the man page" and then... I find jq's man page as difficult as jq itself when trying to use it as a reference.
Anyway, $0.02.
Edited to add: as a basic query language, I find it easy to use. It's when I'm dealing with json that embeds literal json strings that need to be parsed as json a second time, or when I'm trying to manipulate one or more fields in some way before outputting that I struggle. So it's when I'm trying to compose filters and functions inside jq that I find it hard to use.
Agreed. I only use jq once a month or once in two months at most. Every time I want to do something I just search for my use case since I can't seem to remember the syntax.
jq has never come naturally. Every time I try to intuit how to do something, my intuition fails. This is despite having read its man page a dozen times or more, and consulted it even more frequently than that.
I've spent 20+ years on the Unix command line. I know my way around most of it. I can use sed and awk and perl to great effect. But I just can't seem to get jq to stick.
Aside, but there's a lot of times when "I know jq can do this, but I forget exactly how, let me find it in the man page" and then... I find jq's man page as difficult as jq itself when trying to use it as a reference.
Anyway, $0.02.
Edited to add: as a basic query language, I find it easy to use. It's when I'm dealing with json that embeds literal json strings that need to be parsed as json a second time, or when I'm trying to manipulate one or more fields in some way before outputting that I struggle. So it's when I'm trying to compose filters and functions inside jq that I find it hard to use.