Until we've attained AI, all software can be said to be "stupid". Google is stupid. Relational databases are stupid, SQL is stupid. None of it works without human intelligence actively directing it to do work for us. Why single out ORMs?
OP says one ORM is bad so all of them are, you say no some are nicely made (which I agree with), parent ask for a specific example you would recommend and you answer by nitpicking on a single word in his message, one that he even put in quotes himself. And then you finish with a question about something that parent didn't even say or infer.
Either you have an example and you provide it, or you don't and you say so, but your comment was unnecessary and unwanted.
(and so is mine, but I've seen so many of those on HN lately that I just broke and wrote that rant)
You've implicitly defined AI as a level of intelligence that doesn't need human oversight to function. That level doesn't exist yet, but that doesn't mean AI doesn't exist -- it just has a different definition than the one you're using.
Consider Watson (the Jeopardy contest computer lately in the news) -- it can beat the best Jeopardy players, but it's completely unable to function if given a different task or deprived of human oversight. Notwithstanding that limitation, most people will claim it's an example of AI.
Most ORMs are indeed stupid. They often produce completely surprising results at the least opportune moments. They are high maintenance tools that require constant supervision to ensure that you haven't accidentally made some changes which causes something crazy to happen in the ORM. It's about the principle of least surprise, which ORMs often fail horrifically at.
Like the other commenter requested, can you provide an example of an ORM that isn't "stupid"? Your initial comment makes it sound like you've worked with at least one that isn't. We're curious to learn about which these may be.
View my profile for further detail.
As Abelson and Sussman point out in SICP, "Computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather that it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute" (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/front/node3.html).
The software we write is a codified expression of what we think, distilled into a working example that can elevate a discussion from theoretical-based to evidenced-based. Those who have devoted time to think through an issue deeply and have codified their thinking into software would be doing a disservice by not referencing it.
Not only that, but typically you end up balancing between stuff being unavailable because of lazy-loading, and one pageview taking 30 seconds because the ORM collected all the dependencies.
I disagree it's a problem.
going back to Joel again (!) :
"All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky."
I talk about this a lot in this particular talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E09qigk_hnY
Hibernate was a great influence on me but I like to think that it only introduced some ideas in rough form that we've all had many years to improve upon.
The ORM will of course introduce new issues to deal with but this is because it's taking care of a vast amount of persistence code you no longer have to write, and applies a consistency to that persistence logic that would be extremely difficult to achieve without using tools.
As I mentioned, I'm very happy using SQLAlchemy's lower level API. It's a helpful and elegant abstraction over queries and table definitions etc, and I've never needed to circumvent it yet. I'm also convinced that the delightfully flexible/powerful Mako is hands down the best templating library for Python. You, sir, Rock. But you come off as needlessly argumentative in this thread.
The thing is, SQLAlchemy's SQL Expression API is a suitable-level abstraction: high enough to be useful, but not high enough to guarantee leaks. I'm happily making queries with one-liners, and haven't had to circumvent it yet, but I bet I'd have run into trouble with any ORM already.