ORMs Considered Harmful

After a quick read I guess I’ll write the obligatory comment that surely the author is referring to full ORM kits like EF rather than minimalist ones like Dapper.

That assumption in place, I’m mostly in alignment with his comments (damn kids are just delaying learning SQL, which any true Scotsman - I mean programmer - must have at least passable skills with, and the earlier you start getting those XP, the better).

But at same time I don’t know how many commits I’ve done where the summary is essentially “fixed dumb sql error because I was writing it long after I should have gone to bed”. I can appreciate the avoidance of these annoying errors that EF can mostly address at compile time. Of course like most people already of the same mind, every time I’ve started a project with EF it’s been a cul de sac. Glad it exists though, and more power to you if it works for you. I use the heck out of Dapper because it saves me typing but I like/enjoy writing my own SQL, thanks.

Last thought - not learning SQL (to me) also implies not getting comfortable with the data layer generally - modeling, normalizing, optimizing, yada, yada, - skills which make a programmer a better consumer and designer. It’s like any angle on this though - hardware, OS behavior - knowing more about what’s behind any curtain re the upstream and downstream constraints, dependencies, and assumptions will help you write better code for that environment. EF is one of those things that, yeah, you can know all that and claim to use an ORM for efficiency reasons, but I’d wager most people start and end with the ORM to avoid looking behind the curtain and that’s the bad instinct, imo.