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Comment by gnaritas | Hacker News Reader

> ORMs are essentially abstracting relational data structures to fit an OOP development style. It allows OOP engineers to access a DB without straying far from their comfort zone.

Not remotely correct; the purpose of an ORM is to map result sets into objects to avoid repetitive hand coding of those mappings for programs that work with objects. It isn't' about a dev's comfort zone, it's about eliminating the need to hand write repetitive mapping code.

> In essence, they are rarely ever a good idea. As

Also wrong, they are nearly always a good idea as they drastically improve productivity by eliminating tons of manual code that simply isn't necessary to write.

You don't seem to understand the value proposition of an ORM enough to be able to critique it.

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This is completely correct and is the explicit stated rationale for the SQLAlchemy ORM which the original post refers towards (and of which I am the creator of).

And so the debate rages on...

There are two sides to this, illustrated by the parent post and you post. Ultimately, it comes down to style preference and his little actual tangible TECHNICAL benefit. The benefits to team process/organization can definitely be argued for ( or even against ) but, that is why the debate will rage on for eternity, IMO.

If there were no tangible technical benefit ORM's wouldn't be popular. The debate rages on because ORM haters like Climate Change deniers, rarely understand that which they critique. The debate exists because one side is ignorant and cant' tell the difference between using a tool in the wrong situation and a bad tool. ORM's are a great and useful tool and drastically reduce hand written and duplicated code; period, this is a fact and is not debatable. That in some cases they can be misapplied and cause problems doesn't make the tool bad, but it does feed anecdotes that ORM deniers like to pretend is all that exist.

The debate is stupid because one side is taking an absolute position against a programming tool that has been used successfully by thousands(millions?) of projects.

The funny thing about the anti-ORM-ists position is that they are either:

1) Exclusively embedding raw SQL in their code, and accessing each query result by also hard-coding column names and value types in map look-ups. Maybe this is a "pure" approach, but it is also very brittle as models evolve.

Or,

2) They develop their own naive ORM implementation without the self-awareness to realize that is what they are doing. As zzzeek said, "If your application has objects, and talks to a relational database to marshal result rows into instances of those objects, you are using an ORM."

The debate is stupid because one side is taking an absolute position...

Look, I don't have a horse in this race, so let me tell you that, from the outside, it's not so clear which side is being more unreasonable. Or maybe it is.

Edit: just to add something tangible, you're misrepresenting others' position too much.

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