The logical conclusion of this article is that we should all design our own transistors, and program our apps in terms of the circuit that will execute them. That way nothing will trip us up along the way!

My reading of the article was "I didn't know how to use Hibernate or ActiveRecord, but I tried anyway, and they didn't work right." Yeah, that's the software's fault, not yours. Riiight.

As for magic_quotes, the problem was it was too general, not that it was too magical. Have you ever written this:

   run_query("SELECT * FROM foo WHERE foo=?", "'bar'")

Congratulations, the "'bar'" is magically quoted! It works because you are specifying exactly what you want quoted and why.

All in all, this has got to be one of the worst articles I've ever read in my life. And that is saying a lot.