I used to love ORMs so much that I built one for Java, in the early 90s, and it was one of the main offerings of a startup that I joined. I have come around 180 degrees. My rethink started when a developer at a Wall Street bank said: having Oracle on my resume is valuable. Having your ORM on my resume is not.

And then there’s the “now you have two problems” dynamic. You not only have to write high-performing queries, but you have to get the ORM to generate that query for you. And sometimes you don’t want objects. And the schema mapping has to track schema changes.

Just write the damned SQL, it’s not that difficult.

ORMs are so incredibly finicky. I still remember using old Linq-to-SQL (not Entity Framework) and I had to write the linq query in the reverse order of what I expected or it created 3 nested subqueries instead of just joining the tables together. That was when I learned to instantly double check every ORM query I wrote.

> built one for Java, in the early 90s

So was your ORM for Oak? Java didn't hit the public sphere until 1995 IIRC