Yeah, the first post I read was the ORM one, which I thought was such an egregious piece of misinformation that I debunked it ad nauseam (http://darwinweb.net/articles/in-defense-of-orms).

Now in this article there's a telling clue to why he thinks writing SQL by hand is better than using any ORM:

> I can knock out a good website in an hour in PHP, and an excellent one in a day or two.

This suggests that he's working primarily on tiny projects. Of course if you are working on tiny projects than an ORM doesn't buy you much. Also, there is perhaps no language suited better to tiny web projects than PHP and I don't see that changing. If you want to make something measurably better than PHP for general purpose web programming you start having to make decisions that developers don't want taken away from them. Rails does what it does by being opinionated, but it works because if the opinions are ill-suited to your project you can still use Sinatra or whatever. If you move too high up the abstraction layer while trying to still serve a wide audience you end up with the kind of morass that is Drupal, where the system can do almost anything adequately, but it doesn't do a great job of anything because of the creaking weight of the infrastructure that attempts to be everything to everyone.