The idea is good, but the approach cannot execute sufficiently. First, jc has to individually support each program and program mode, so improvements are bottlen

The idea is good, but the approach cannot execute sufficiently. First, jc has to individually support each program and program mode, so improvements are bottlenecked on jc. Everytime you load a program you need to load all jc parsers. I also wonder how resistant the parsing is to surprises (filenames with bracket characters in ls output for example). Second, this does not handle interprogram piping (e.g. 'find . | xargs dosomething'). We have filtering to console but little piping (we can map the json output to a single column and pipe that, using the textual interface with all its deficiencies). To be clear, the author has no choice (rewriting all userland is a daunting concept), but a proper approach for 21th century Unix would be for all utilities to output and receive json (or whatever format is chosen) natively, and that the console would then be able to mange that into a textual format for the user.