This also won't work since it'll crash on missing fields. e.get("commit", {}).get("author", "") maybe (ignoring the corner case of non-list top level object).

Which is pretty useful - I will get malformed JSON error as earlier as possible.

P.S. `some.get("A", {})["B"]` is bad programming habit because there might be a list on `some["A"]`

You can do it like this with Jello (I am the author):

    jello '[e.commit for e in _ if e.commit.author == "Tom Hudson"]'

Jello let’s you use python syntax with dot notation without the stdin/stdout/json.loads boilerplate.

https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jello

This is a non-problem solved by the jq example. Clearly nobody sane writes (or consumes) APIs which sometimes produce array of object, sometimes produce singular objects of the same shape... Or maybe I'm spoiled from using typed languages and cannot see the ingenuity of the python/javascript/other-untyped-hyped-lang api authors that it solves?

> Clearly nobody sane writes (or consumes) APIs which sometimes produce array of object, sometimes produce singular objects of the same shape...

Has nothing to do with arrays, it has to do with the fact that Python dicts with string indexes and Python objects with properties are different things, unlike JS where member and index access are just different ways of accessing object properties.

> Or maybe I'm spoiled from using typed languages and cannot see the ingenuity of the python/javascript/other-untyped-hyped-lang api authors that it solves?

This isn't an untyped thing, this is a JavaScript (and thus JSON) and Python have type systems (even if they usually don't statically declare them) and those type systems and thus the syntax around objects are different between the two.

I see. I am spoiled, I think. :)

Oops, yep totally. Even more futzy! Think if I was doing this a lot I'd totally pull out one of those "dict wrappers that allow for attr-based access" that lots of projects end up writing for whatever reason