Playing with `jp` a bit, I still like it, but it's very frustrating to do updates in place. For example, I wanted to write a simple expression to delete output

Playing with `jp` a bit, I still like it, but it's very frustrating to do updates in place. For example, I wanted to write a simple expression to delete outputs from an ipython notebook. { "cells": [{ "stuff": "blah blah", "outputs": ["crap", "to", "delete"] }], "other stuff": "blah blah" } The simplest expression I could come up with was: merge(@, { "cells": map( &merge(@, {"outputs": `[]`}), cells[] ) }) And that's verbose because you're reconstructing the structure. In fairness, it's impressive that the language can express it at all, given it's a query language. Maybe the real answer is to denote a subset of JMESPath that is guaranteed to return assignable nodes, that is only selects, slices, filters, etc. Then you run the query and perform assignments against those.