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 proje

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."