Daniele is a great guy and I deal w/ him regularly as he's the author of psycopg2. However the mistake he makes here is in the realm of database abstraction to

Daniele is a great guy and I deal w/ him regularly as he's the author of psycopg2. However the mistake he makes here is in the realm of database abstraction tools having the sole rationale of "database agnostic code". That's really not the main rationale, nor is it really "hide the database so people don't have to learn SQL". The main one is "automation of work". A lot of the comments here refer to situations where hand-rolling everything always was just too error prone. There's a thing we do in computers when a job is very repetitive, tedious, error prone, and follows a complete pattern that you can define algorithmically, which is, write a program to do it!. that said I'm sort of glad Django took the heat on this one and not SQLAlchemy so I can get to bed without obsessing :)