Readers of my series on writing log files as Lisp code (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) may enjoy Paul Querna’s post over at Paul’s Journal entitled Write Logs for Machines, use JSON. In it he says that it’s time give up the traditional printf style log entries that are meant primarily for humans and to write them instead in JSON so that they can be processed by machines.
I agree that that idea has a lot of merit. I think you could make a good case that JSON makes more sense than s-expressions because there are tools to work with them in virtually every language whereas sexprs pretty much require some sort of Lisp language to handle well.
Querna’s post is well worth some of your time if you’re involved with writing or processing log files. He goes over some of the tools available to help with the processing and talks about some of his home-grown ones.