The Hunt for the Missing Data Type
www.hillelwayne.com/post/graph-types
What Jamie wrote
Wayne writes about how common graph relationship problems show up in programming and wonders why we don't have much more robust support for graphs built-in to languages. Fundamentally he comes to a conclusion on why generic support for graphs is not suitable.
So, the reasons we don't have widespread graph support:
- There are many different kinds of graphs
- There are many different representations of each kind of graph
- There are many different graph algorithms
- Graph algorithm performance is very sensitive to graph representation and implementation details
- People run very expensive algorithms on very big graphs.
Hou then writes a great response that there is a great language for graphs in The "missing" graph datatype already exists — Datalog, a declarative logic programming language.
Both articles are a good read.