Actually unless one is doing JavaScript, JSON is extremely difficult to parse correctly. I challenge you to write a simple, understandable JSON parser in Bourne shell or in AWK.
Sorry for the misquote, but does it get to the heart of your objection?
I'm torn here. On the one hand I want to say "Those are not languages one typically writes parsers in," but that's a really muddled argument:
1. People "parse" things often in bash/awk because they have to -- because bash etc deal in unstructured data.
2. Maybe "reasonable" languages should be trivially parseable so we can do it in Bash (etc).
I'm kinda torn. On the one hand bash is unreasonably effective, on the other I want data types to be opaque so people don't even try to parse them... would love to hear arguments though.
If you want to deal with JSON, I'd recommend jq as an easy manipulation tool.
And AWK, if it’s not easily parsable with the language specifically designed for parsing data, something is wrong with that data.
It won't, because JSON is a standard. Imperfect like all standards but practically good enough. And "plain text" just means "an undefined syntax that I have to mostly guess". And nobody "programs" in bash or awk anymore. The "standard scripting languages" for all sane devs are Python or Ruby (and some Perl legacy) and parsing JSON in them is trivial.
The "UNIX philosophy" was a cancerous bad idea anyway and now it's thankfully being eaten alive by its own children, so time to... rejoice?!
EDIT+: Also, if I feel truly lazy/evil (like in "something I'll only in this JS project"), I would use something much much less standard than JSON, like JSON-5 (https://github.com/json5/json5), which will practically truly force all consumers to use JS :P
And almost always you can find an alternative to non-tree-based representation without having to reinvent sexprs. Look at how ps represents the process tree, for example.
I have, however, written a JSON parser before at a previous company in C++ (they didn't want to pull in a library). It wasn't particularly hard.
And yes, like any other parser, it accepted additional non-JSON constructs. This was simply because it was take additional work to error out on those constructs, which would be a waste of time.
It doesn't matter how sensible a format is, those tools are simply not appropriate to write a parser in.
AWK is a language designed for data parsing and processing. That is what it is designed to do.
How did you solve the parsing of arbitrarily nested structures?
Write a recursive descent parser, or use a parser generator.
Or, more realistically, use one of the many libraries available for parsing it (pretty much every language has one at this point).
If awk cannot parse it, perhaps it’s a shortcoming of awk? =)