> There is only one reason, and it's that people don't understand how to use SQL Unfortunately, I immediately think you have misunderstood. While ORMs and othe

> There is only one reason, and it's that people don't understand how to use SQL Unfortunately, I immediately think you have misunderstood. While ORMs and other database abstractions may be a boon to folks who don’t know SQL, or at least some may think that, it is not the only reason that people use them. It may not even be one of the bigger reasons. Type safety is first and foremost a great example. Wouldn’t it be great if you could literally not ship SQL code that has typos, syntax errors, or other query errors? Unit tests catch those, but you have to actually write them, and they still can’t help if you hold things wrong. (Like using sprintf for SQL queries, god help us. Yes, that is a mistake no professional should make. But if you add enough layers of complexity, you might just fool someone who knows better into doing basically that with extra steps. There are some ways to combat this of course, like PEP 675[1].) In some environments you might accomplish this with compile-time linting or advanced metaprogramming. However, ORMs also do this right out of the box generally, at least in languages where it can be done. But even then, that doesn’t scratch the surface of what’s possible. Mind you, with sqlc, we’re still talking about making raw SQL queries. But those SQL queries contain tons of information that gets duplicated by the programmer. For example, it is possible to statically know what types of inputs and output columns any given query will have based on just the schema and the query itself. sqlc gives you this information. It generates correct wrappers for SQL code using only raw SQL queries as input. This is not the only benefit of abstractions of course. And sqlc doesn’t give you all of the benefits of an ORM. However, that’s exactly what I’m trying to say: a lot of people have an idea in their head about what an abstraction must entail, but there’s probably better tradeoffs that are genuinely not susceptible to the same issues that you’re imagining. Case in point, I have a feeling you interpreted my post to only be regarding ORMs, but even the text you quoted is more general—I said “database abstractions” for a reason :) [1]: https://peps.python.org/pep-0675/ https://peps.python.org/pep-0675/