Had JSON been around when I was born in the 1970’s Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie may very well have embraced it as a recommended output format to help programs “do one thing well” in a pipeline.

To that end, I argue that linux and all of its supporting GNU and non-GNU utilities should offer JSON output options. We already see some limited support of this in systemctl and the iproute2 utilities like ip where you can output in JSON format with the -j option.