I agree JSON is probably not right for every type of program output, but the age of web APIs has shown us that is probably great or adequate 90% of the time. If

I agree JSON is probably not right for every type of program output, but the age of web APIs has shown us that is probably great or adequate 90% of the time. If something is spewing out long lines of data I think JSON Lines would be a good option so you don’t need to read the whole structure into RAM. But any other structured output that has a healthy community and ecosystem supporting it would be better than just space delimited lines, or worse - groups of lines you need to deal with.