I'm admittedly an ORM apologist [1], but a few of his points articulated as "deal breakers" aren't that bad imo:

- "the pernicious use of foreign keys [...] links between classes are [...] foreign keys" ==> that just sounds like schema normalization, which is usually a good thing?

- "bending over backwards [...] to generate SQL that runs efficiently" ==> the huge majority of ORM-driven queries are "select * from table where id in ..."; for the queries that are more complicated than that, then yes use SQL! That's allowed!

Folks who dislike ORMs seem to have this false dichotomy that "the ORM _must_ be used for all queries", which is a self-imposed/unpractical restriction.

- "dual schema dangers" ==> he's exactly right that database should own the schema definition, but then just codegen the entities from the db schema? That's your singular source of truth, no drift. You can do this with Hibernate, ActiveRecord, Joist, many ORMs.

- "Identities" ==> ironically I think ORMs (that use the unit of work pattern) actually have net-better DX here b/c you can hook up a graph of entities with just references.

I.e. hook up a book to its author w/o knowing their ids yet, which explicitly avoids the annoyance he mentions of doing a partial commit/going to the db to figure out "what value should I INSERT into in the book.author_id column?" (but my author is new) in the middle of your business logic that just wants to "create books".

- transactions ==> agreed that "transactions via annotations" ala JPA/Hibernate are terrible, but afaiu all "internet scale" apps these days do reads outside of transactions, and just use op-locking during the singular flush/commit step to the db.

Disclaimer I am sure I won't change anyone's minds :-)

Edit: in the HN comments, we're debating "the best way to generate SQL", which is fine, but imo it overlooks the biggest value for ORMs: enforcing business invariants.

I.e. yes a simple INSERT is trivial is write, "why have the ORM to that!", but are you going to enforce the same business logic in the 10 places you do `INSERT authors` in your codebase? And if the answer is "I write an single `insertAuthor` abstraction to enforce this" then you're half-way to writing an adhoc half-specified, bug-riddled version of what a reactive ORM like Joist will do for you. [2] :-)

[1] https://joist-orm.io/

[2] https://joist-orm.io/modeling/why-entities/

What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)