Comment by marginalia_nu
5 hours ago
I think the big problem is it's a tool you usually reach for so rarely you never quite get the opportunity to really learn it well, so it always remains in that valley of despair where you know you should use it, but it's never intuitive or easy to use.
It's not unique in that regard. 'sed' is Turing complete[1][2], but few people get farther than learning how to do a basic regex substitution.
[1] https://catonmat.net/proof-that-sed-is-turing-complete
[1] And arguably a Turing tarpit.
I was just going to say, jq is like sed in that I only use 1% of it 99% of the time, but unlike sed in that I'm not aware of any clearly better if less ubiquitous alternatives to the 1% (e.g., Perl or ripgrep for simple regex substitutions in pipelines because better regex dialects).
Closest I've come, if you're willing to overlook its verbosity and (lack of) speed, is actually PowerShell, if only because it's a bit nicer than Python or JavaScript for interactive use.