Well, it means not rolling your own parser. But that's not hard. The real advantage is when you actually ARE dealing with structured data, with nested objects.

Well, it means not rolling your own parser. But that's not hard. The real advantage is when you actually ARE dealing with structured data, with nested objects. Most standard UNIX formats are bad at this, and sometimes you find it necessary. Also, because JSON is so common, you get really good tooling for handling structured data by defult, instead of kinda-okay tooling for 50 different slightly-incompatable formats. 10 operations on 10 datastructures vs 100 operations on 1, and all that. But for unstructured data, or for one-level key/value data, JSON is overkill. You can use DSV, like this: key1:value1 key2:value2 and so:on