JSON HAS BECOME TODAY'S MACHINE-READABLE OUTPUT FORMAT ON UNIX

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

JSON has a bunch of pragmatic virtues in a modern UNIX system. It provides a clear and basically unambiguous way to represent text and most numeric data, and it's also generally extensible. There are increasingly more tools to deal with and process JSON and it can generally be transformed to various other formats if needed. Designing a machine-readable output format is somewhat more complicated than it looks - using JSON means that people writing programs don't have to design their own formats.