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How is hand rolled SQL queries something bad?

Bad. Like really bad. Unless you're doing it for some small corner case where you need up to the list bit of performance, raw SQL queries and mapping them to objects or manually moving or many pulsating the result sets manually is really bad. Specially for others having to maintain your code 3 years later.

There's a reason ORMs are so popular.

Personally I prefer the opposite, I have managed many old projects (10+ years old) and I always prefer raw SQL over some outdated ORM that is hard to configure and finetune. With SQL I have access to one of the most powerful query languages in existence that can never be matched by an database layer written in general purpose language.

Raw SQL can be a bit problematic if it is spread out in the entire code base with little structure ("littered"), however that is relatively easy to fix by centralizing the queries with a repository pattern. It is much harder to fix an ORM ten years later.

Do we know why ORM's are popular? I don't think it has to do with that ORM's are good, rather that developers want to avoid SQL because lack of experience, but that is me guessing based on my prejudice (I was myself in that category as a junior).

I have written in the past why ORM's are bad https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27407690

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