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 tha

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.