I think this comment points to an even deeper insight: shell is a crappy programming language but with amazing extensibility.

I would argue that once you pull in jq, you're no longer writing in "shell", you're writing in jq, which is a separate and different language. But that's precisely the point! Look at how effortless it is to (literally) shell out to a slew of other languages from shell.

The power of shell isn't in the scripting language itself, it's in how fluidly it lets you embed snippets of tr, sed, awk, jq, and whatever else you need.

And, critically, these languages callable from shell were not all there when shell was designed. The extension interface of spawning processes and communicating with arguments and pipes is just that powerful. That's where shell shines.

Do you have examples of concurrent use-cases that xargs and parallel don't satisfy? I discovered parallel recently and was blown away by how much it improves things. I've only really used it in basic scenarios so far, just wondering where its limitations are.

How do you use dmenu for your shell script? to launch it? to prompt the user for input while it's running?

Do you have an example of a script you wrote?

Can you give an example of how you'd use rq in this pipeline? I'm not finding any good examples

new to 'rq', it's not in active development, any other alternatives? it seems doing a lot other than convert structured data to json.