"Those tried and true commands we were referring to? None other than the usual awk sed cut grep and of course the Unix pipe | to glue them all together. Really, why use a JSON parsing program that only could only do one function (parse JSON) when I could use a combination of tools that, when piped together, could do far more?" IMHO, drinking the UNIX Kool-Aid means not only using coreutils and BSD userlands but also…
It has bison and flex files in the source code currently.
> jq uses flex in the creation of a language interpreter intended^1 to process any JSON. I use flex not to create a language interpeter but to process only JSON from a single source. The blog author uses shell script to process JSON from a single source.^2 I think of the use I make of flex as like a compiled shell script. It's faster.
Like, you have a flex template and you fill in with ad-hoc C code? Nice, would find it more readable than a jq script, although a basic jq script is just a mix of bash and javascript and when I grok it for the 123th time (because it's innatural, odd, inside a shell) it gets better.