Comment by jakewins | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jakewins | Hacker News Reader

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There's nothing stopping you from flipping that relationship order though, or making that pattern more compact. In fact, I'd prefer an overall reversed order, something like:

  MATCH (openCypher)-[:MAKES_AVAILBLE]->(cypher:QueryLanguage)-[:QUERIES]->(graphs),
        (u:User)-[:USES]->(cypher)
  WHERE u.name IN [‘Oracle’, ‘Apache Spark’, ‘Tableau’, ‘Structr’]
  RETURN cypher.attributes

I guess, in this particular case, it's subjective preference which language you feel expresses the query pattern most legibly. I certainly prefer the visual approach of cypher.

Ah, thats better as you don't need all the unbound variables. However, you still don't need "graphs" unless for the English reading of the promotion.

In Gremlin3, the above is:

  g.V().match(
    as("openCypher").out("makesAvailable").hasLabel("QueryLanguage").as("cypher").out("queries").as("graphs"),
    as("user").out("uses").as("cypher"),
      where("user", within(["Oracle","Apache Spark", "Tableau", "Structr"])),
        select("cypher").by("attributes")

I like cypher, then gremlin for small queries. The problem is the queries I see are much, much larger. And at about 10 lines in the use of white space in SPARQL starts to make a real difference in readability in my opinion.

That can of course also be affected by my slight reading disability where the shape of the words is important. This shape could be disturbed by the connecting sigils in both gremlin and Cypher. So I understand that my preference might not hold for the whole population :)

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