I think there may already exist a jq alternative for every letter of English alphabet. Why not just make a tool that specializes at transcoding csv/json/xml/protobuf/etc, and leave querying to any of dozens of these utils, that already exist? So that I can write qq input.xml -o json | jq '.' | qq -f json -o hcl? It's not like the intention is to bring something new with regards to querying lanuage, the "real stuff" is just an heuristic transcoder of popular data serialization formats.