I've been a long time elasticsearch user and can say that I personally HATE sql syntax when it comes to querying data in mysql, just because I usually can't get

I've been a long time elasticsearch user and can say that I personally HATE sql syntax when it comes to querying data in mysql, just because I usually can't get the joins right etc to build a search that is reasonable. However, they might be taking this approach because sql syntax is familiar. JSON data structures for querying over HTTP was used with elasticsearch because they were familiar to most developers. I think overall it helps adoption if you have layers that are not completely foreign to the implementing developers. They could have written their query syntax in protocol buffers or coffescript or what ever the hell they wanted really, but I think that would have hurt adoption.