This is a pragmatic piece of Fowler on the rather dry topic of Object-relational mappings - in short, the attempt to marry an object-oriented code base with a relational data base.

Usually you’d get enough early success to commit deeply to the framework and only after a while did you realize you were in a quagmire - this is where I sympathize greatly with Ted Neward’s famous quote that object-relational mapping is the Vietnam of Computer Science

What Fowler refers to here, is Ted Neward’s article “The Vietnam Of Computer Science”

  • cecilkorik@lemmy.ca
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    1 day ago

    Two choices always seem to end up as the fate of any large scale, long-term developed database application. Either you use an ORM, or you build your own piece by piece. I know which one makes more sense to me.

    • Maestro@fedia.io
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      1 day ago

      Same goes for any application that are proud to use “no framework”. It just means that you partially implemented your own poorly documented half-assed framework.

      • uuj8za@piefed.social
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        21 hours ago

        It’s a little more nuanced than that.

        I will gladly write my own small, half-assed framework that I 100% know, can reason about, can debug, and can extend to fit my requirements. I will gladly pass on a fat-assed, bloated framework with a million dependencies, where I only need a few features, and where if I need something that isn’t offered by the framework I have to submit a PR or add some janky-ass workaround.

        • Maestro@fedia.io
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          19 hours ago

          That is fine for your personal projects. It stops being fine as soon as you need to hire extra people and grow the team.

          • Tempy@programming.dev
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            17 hours ago

            Does it, if you can work on the normal application code, there’s no reason you can’t work on the lower levels of applications. It’s all just code. Ramp up might take a bit more time, but I wouldn’t expect horrendously so. As long as your patterns make sense and what is there is written well enough and is not a spaghetti monster in the making, any one should be able to pick it up.