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Gremlin was written by a genius level developer to be used by other genius level developers. There are maybe a handful of Gremlin experts in the entire world an

Gremlin was written by a genius level developer to be used by other genius level developers. There are maybe a handful of Gremlin experts in the entire world and less than 100 that are any good at it. It is extremely powerful, but after a few lines, the mental acrobatics needed to understand what the query does is beyond your average developer. My first paid Neo4j gig 7 years ago was writing a rules engine in gremlin. It was about 25 lines of code. If you were to ask me today what each of those lines did, I would be at a loss. So would anyone who didn't live in those specific queries day in and day out. Graph adoption was severely limited by its use. Cypher can be learned in a day, and "business people" can look at a cypher query and understand what is going on for the most part. It takes about a week to "bolt on" Gremlin to any database. I've done it myself, that's why you see it so often. It takes months to be any good at it.

rajman187 7y ago
Far from a genius myself, I've quite enjoyed using Gremlin and the Apache Tinkerpop project. If you start thinking of it as a functional language, I believe that helps clarify quite a bit what is going on. Unfortunately when using it with a distributed backend (Cassandra, for example), having to write query templates to take advantage of bit-wise comparisons for parameterizing, all in Groovy, was extremely painful mostly because I found Groovy to be very awkward. But there are language-native protocol implementations of Gremlin now. The little self-contained Apache Tinkerpop project was always fun to play with toy graphhs in. And there was an ambitious project to implement the Tinkerpop engine on top of a Redis backend (akin to RedisGraph which is now an official module using Cypher) but it is far from a straightforward project. There is even a Tinkerpop implementation on top of PostgreSQL which looks interesting. I'm not sure this is a death blow for Tinkerpop so much as a marketing coup the grace for Neo4J. They have a strong product (despite the index-free adjacency!) and an even strong branding behind it. Anything that brings graph DB/technologies into the mainstream is always nice, though. Not that everything in the world is a graph problem...but surely there are plenty that can be classified as such.

rajman187 7y ago

Far from a genius myself, I've quite enjoyed using Gremlin and the Apache Tinkerpop project. If you start thinking of it as a functional language, I believe that helps clarify quite a bit what is going on. Unfortunately when using it with a distributed backend (Cassandra, for example), having to write query templates to take advantage of bit-wise comparisons for parameterizing, all in Groovy, was extremely painful mostly because I found Groovy to be very awkward. But there are language-native protocol implementations of Gremlin now. The little self-contained Apache Tinkerpop project was always fun to play with toy graphhs in. And there was an ambitious project to implement the Tinkerpop engine on top of a Redis backend (akin to RedisGraph which is now an official module using Cypher) but it is far from a straightforward project. There is even a Tinkerpop implementation on top of PostgreSQL which looks interesting. I'm not sure this is a death blow for Tinkerpop so much as a marketing coup the grace for Neo4J. They have a strong product (despite the index-free adjacency!) and an even strong branding behind it. Anything that brings graph DB/technologies into the mainstream is always nice, though. Not that everything in the world is a graph problem...but surely there are plenty that can be classified as such.