The ‘nearly’ Turing complete is something I wonder about. It feels like jq might have some limitations - transformations it can’t do, due to some inherent limitation of how it handles scope or data flow. The esoteric syntax makes it hard to determine sometimes whether what you are attempting is actually possible.

As soon as jq scripts reach a certain level of complexity I break out to writing a node script instead.

And given how rapidly jq scripts acquire complexity, that level is pretty low. One nested lookup, and I’m out.