Comment by maxdemarzi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxdemarzi | Hacker News Reader

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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 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.

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.

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