digiwano

> You apply one of eight abilities to the lemmings, which all have obvious uses but can also follow on and interrupt each other to offer new possibilities.

This is a really good point. Lemmings was one of the earliest examples of real-time emergent gameplay based on a handful of simple rules, and nowadays the number of games that include similar mechanics is kind of mind-blowing.

Knowing whether to `SELECT *` vs `SELECT a,b,c` is the entry-level/babys-first-optimization case. Providing a high level and performant ORM, takes deep knowledge of the underlying database and a lot of code complexity. But that wasn’t really my point. My point was:

If you’re using an ORM this whole article is moot to you. You don’t decide whether `SELECT *` is the being used or not (let alone more complex optimizations), and if you do actually delve this deep into your ORM you are in the vast minority of coders

if you’re using an ORM it’s an architectural decision that was mandated early on in whatever project, so even if you did find out a naive `select *` is being used by your third-party ORM, the whole point would be moot because we can’t just switch out ORMs for this project.

So for most people using an ORM, this is useless information because either you don’t know/care or your organization won’t let you know/care because they’re already doing it that way organization-wide.

I’m not saying developer-friendly APIs are bad, but i do think hand-crafted, well-written, and well-tested SQL outperforms any ORM, and if any ORM comes close to the performance of hand-crafted queries, it does so at the cost of complexity.

Raw database queries aren’t difficult except in extreme edge cases that most ORMs aren’t smart enough to handle either. ORMs do make things slightly “easier”, but that comes at a cost. Whether that cost is in terms of performance or complexity or developers losing understanding/knowledge of how to build code that leans into the benefits of whichever database you choose comes down to whichever ORM you’re using, but that trade off will always be there.

And either way, 99% of people using any random ORM have no idea whether a `select *` is being used or not. That’s the whole point. You put blind faith into whatever ORM believing it will do the “right”/“most optimized” thing.

Of course, all of this goes completely out the window if your company mandates an ORM for database access, which i feel it’s pretty safe to say about 90% of companies do.

But that’s the point of ORMs. Disregard anything that makes your database different than any other, and any of its optimizations, so that you can pretend raw data fits an OO-paradigm and feel safe because you can go `customer.name = “dork”; customer.save();` and make anything more complicated than that Somebody Else’s Problem.