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100%. I've come to believe that essentially every software engineer, if they write software long enough, comes to despise ORMs. As I always say "They make the e

100%. I've come to believe that essentially every software engineer, if they write software long enough, comes to despise ORMs. As I always say "They make the easy stuff a little easier, and they make the harder stuff way harder". I have yet to see an ORM actually save me time in the long run; most of the time it just feels like I'm battling it. SQL definitely has its warts, but I don't feel like ORMs make it possible to ignore those warts at all. I'd love it if a better language like PRQL was accepted by DB engines and just compiled to SQL in the DB. Was a good blog post a couple years ago that I think highlights a lot of problems with ORMs and query builders: https://gajus.medium.com/stop-using-knex-js-and-earn-30-bf410349856c https://gajus.medium.com/stop-using-knex-js-and-earn-30-bf41...

smaudet 3y ago
I too think ORM was the wrong approach. I still enjoy SQLite - its not perfect, but every time I see it being used I get the warm and fuzzies. We should have just built better libraries around using/targeting one flavor (SQLite, e.g.), instead of wasting time with bad libraries that transformed one bit of bad code to another bit of bad code and ran it on a database engine that wasn't even doing it right... When you solve a problem, you solve it at its source, not five miles away with a teleprompter. If relational algebra is what we should all have been using, then relational algebra is what we should have been optimizing for, not overpriced SQL database engines. To shamelessly steal from another comment here: https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/unexplanations-relational-algebra-is-math/ https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/unexplanations-re... https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/unexplanations-sql-is-syntactic-sugar-for-relational-algebra/ https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/unexplanations-sq...

smaudet 3y ago

I too think ORM was the wrong approach. I still enjoy SQLite - its not perfect, but every time I see it being used I get the warm and fuzzies. We should have just built better libraries around using/targeting one flavor (SQLite, e.g.), instead of wasting time with bad libraries that transformed one bit of bad code to another bit of bad code and ran it on a database engine that wasn't even doing it right... When you solve a problem, you solve it at its source, not five miles away with a teleprompter. If relational algebra is what we should all have been using, then relational algebra is what we should have been optimizing for, not overpriced SQL database engines. To shamelessly steal from another comment here: https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/unexplanations-relational-algebra-is-math/ https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/unexplanations-re... https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/unexplanations-sql-is-syntactic-sugar-for-relational-algebra/ https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/unexplanations-sq...