Explore the journey of designing and implementing Cypher, a graph query language for Neo4j, in this 43-minute conference talk from Strange Loop. Delve into the challenges and insights gained over five years of development, including the balance between specialization and expressiveness, simplicity and complexity, and ease of learning versus mastery. Discover the importance of creating a high-level declarative language with high-performance implementation capabilities, and learn about the evolution of Cypher to meet changing needs while maintaining reliability. Gain valuable lessons from both successes and mistakes in language design, applicable to anyone interested in creating widely-used languages. Follow the progression from navigational databases to object-oriented programming, embedded databases, and REST APIs, understanding how data needs have changed over time. Examine Cypher basics, versioning, user studies, and ongoing challenges in semantics and syntax. Conclude with insights into the future of Cypher and its impact on the graph database ecosystem. Read more