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If you go through and learn some basic examples, JQ is a lot more understandable than seeing golfed examples in the wild might led you to believe. I wrote a tut

If you go through and learn some basic examples, JQ is a lot more understandable than seeing golfed examples in the wild might led you to believe. I wrote a tutorial once. But it does also seem like a place where LLMs are handy. Why learn jq or regex or AWK, if you use them infrequently, when you can just ask an llm? Edit: tutorial: https://earthly.dev/blog/jq-select/ https://earthly.dev/blog/jq-select/

guelo 1y ago
It feels like we're in danger of being stuck with the popular tools we have now for the foreseeable future. Why use a new tool when you can have the LLM figure it out using the old tools? Which means LLMs can't learn new tools because there's no human examples for them to learn from.
- photonthug 1y ago
  Of course, it's different for tools that aren't open, but. Using best-in-class tools rather than making new ones is usually just a reasonable choice to avoid fragmentation of effort/interest that's ultimately pretty harmful to any software ecosystem. As an example.. any candidate for replacing jq needs to be either faster or easier. If it's only a faster implementation, why change the query language? If it's only a different query language but not faster, then why not transpile the new query language into one that works with the old engine? Doing both at the same time without sacrificing completeness/expressiveness in the query language may warrant fragmentation of effort/interest, but that's a very high bar I would think..
  - naniwaduni 1y ago
    > If it's only a faster implementation, why change the query language? Often enough, languages have weird accidental quirks of the implementation that resist fast alternative implementation. There are ways around this (and of course there's nearly always room to improve the original implementation without having to entirely redesign it), but sometimes it really is easier to just implement a different language.

guelo 1y ago

It feels like we're in danger of being stuck with the popular tools we have now for the foreseeable future. Why use a new tool when you can have the LLM figure it out using the old tools? Which means LLMs can't learn new tools because there's no human examples for them to learn from.

photonthug 1y ago
Of course, it's different for tools that aren't open, but. Using best-in-class tools rather than making new ones is usually just a reasonable choice to avoid fragmentation of effort/interest that's ultimately pretty harmful to any software ecosystem. As an example.. any candidate for replacing jq needs to be either faster or easier. If it's only a faster implementation, why change the query language? If it's only a different query language but not faster, then why not transpile the new query language into one that works with the old engine? Doing both at the same time without sacrificing completeness/expressiveness in the query language may warrant fragmentation of effort/interest, but that's a very high bar I would think..
- naniwaduni 1y ago
  > If it's only a faster implementation, why change the query language? Often enough, languages have weird accidental quirks of the implementation that resist fast alternative implementation. There are ways around this (and of course there's nearly always room to improve the original implementation without having to entirely redesign it), but sometimes it really is easier to just implement a different language.