ORMs aren't a bad idea; they just aren't a drop-in replacement for in-memory data structures for traditional imperative languages. They drop in rather well for

ORMs aren't a bad idea; they just aren't a drop-in replacement for in-memory data structures for traditional imperative languages. They drop in rather well for functional languages though. Also, many ORMs are simply flat-footed, but we shouldn't fault ORMs generally any more than we should call C "slow" because some compiler is particularly bad.