ORM (Object Relation Mapping) is the new automatic memory management.  You wouldn’t want to go back to having manage pointers and allocate and de allocate memory.  This is how we advance.   The less unnecessary complexity the better.  I think most languages and platforms will eventually have this built in.  Rails provides Active Record which is based on a Martin Fowler pattern of the same name.  Java has hibernate, cocoon and about a hundred other frameworks most of which have/are being replicated into the .Net space.

So if you have a decent database design you can really take advantage of the ORM to make your life so much easier.  Of course queries can be optimized etc if you need them to be but all of this logic can be put into the Ruby (Java, .NET) language functions used to query the database.  Things like order by, limit, sorting can also be specified. 

The nice part is that the schema needs to make sense to be used.  The id field is always called “id”.  Foreign keys are always named with the tablename_id so it’s consistent.  That’s the advantage of Rails, there’s so much organization built in and you always know where pieces of code are going to be, ie models, views, controllers, libraries, etc.  

How many times have you opened someone’s project and had to hunt around trying to find what you are looking for.  

Why do we have 2 x 4’s?  Wouldn’t it be great if each carpenter could choose the dimensions of lumber to use for each project?  Why limit the choice? 

The answer is obvious or should be and the same thing goes for software development.  Microsoft has done a great disservice for developers by not mandating a coding standard which includes indentation and style along with project organization.  

This is the only way we can continue to handle more complexity; we must delegate some of it to the computer and use standards.