There is the problem for me. ORMs (well maybe Entity Framework with LINQ) don't attempt to be an abstraction. They are more like sprintf. Knowing sprintf does

There is the problem for me. ORMs (well maybe Entity Framework with LINQ) don't attempt to be an abstraction. They are more like sprintf. Knowing sprintf doesn't free you from knowing what numbers look like as strings. ORMs don't free you from knowing SQL. They free you from having to write some tedious shelping rows to objects.