the leap from ORM->code generation->magical thinking!! -> IS BAD , just hysterics. A clear example of the slippery slope logical fallacy. Good ORMs are a huge productivity boost and entirely worth it. Those particular PHP coders who barely know programming (keep in mind, this is just a subset of PHP programmers I'm referring to) should not use relational databases at all, they should stick to simple key/value stores - they don't need joins, they don't need subqueries, they've no concept of transactional isolation, foreign what ? Just use a K/V.