Emulating an HTTP session (with cookies passing) between request is more complicated for instance. Retry based on response content is doable but easier with a declarative format. jq is perfect for JSON response, what about HTML/XML response? Our testers prefer to write a text based declarative test, instead of a Bash script. It depends on your needs/backgrounds.
At that point wouldn't you want to use Python, Node, Ruby, etc?
Using a binary can be (in my experience, 99% of the time) an enormous convenience and performance boost over including a whole runtime for those languages.
> Emulating an HTTP session (with cookies passing) between request is more complicated for instance.
Are cookie jars not sufficient for that? Curl supports those on its own.
Thanks four your reply - just had restful services in my mind when writing my response.