Comment by xmprt

For active record patterns I disagree: it’s nice to work with data in a way that feels natural. Chugging simple stuff around in a recognizable way is what you’d end up writing anyway in many applications. Writing your ORM-lite is waste.

When it comes to advanced queries learning the ORM equivalent to the SQL it should write… ORM’s can be outright terrible, and I completely agree with you.

Every ORM has their own names and way of doing things, so this knowledge is hard to port to other ORMs. It’s requires you knowing the right SQL first, then knowing how to write that in the ORM dialect.

Reaching for the more advanced ORM trickery means grasping hard to grasp subjects twice with the risk of misunderstanding twice, and as a bonus worse ORM documentation than plain active record features. Oh, and others need to understand what you’ve written as well.

I'd also argue whether ORMs actually save that much time in practice. In Java, for example, the main time sink is the JDBC plumbing and its easy to use something like JDBI that handles that plumbing without abstracting away the underlying SQL.

The application->database layer is pretty impactful and it pays to pay attention to it, because poor access patterns will cause a lot of trouble in the future, and its made worse by not having a very accurate understanding of whats going on in that layer.

I think a lot of developers don't have a good sense on where their time sinks actually are. Boilerplate is not pleasant to write but also not the timeline-destroyer people tend to think it is. And its often not enough of a time-sink to warrant introducing "magic" that will have very large negative future impacts.