[eluser]Jelmer[/eluser]
Quote:ORMs seem too “magical” for me. The biggest problem with frameworks is that they move developers too far away from what actually happens and an ORM feels like that for me. It would be used by a handful of developers who appreciate it and confuse the rest.
There's nothing magical about it. In general it's a good thing to code as much DRY as possible, which often means that you'll write helpers/libraries that take care of the lower level programming. Of course it's good to remind yourself from time to time how things work behind the scenes and don't use a sledgehammer (a humongous function) when a normal one (basic PHP) will do. But using libraries that perform repetitive simple tasks in one simple call will result in far better code.
Conventional wisdom is that needing such helpers/libraries will slow you down as they're written genericly and not specificly for the task (if they're well written that is). The end result is often that your code is far easier to read, it's easier to maintain and it's easier to spot mistakes. All of that often results in far better code that will be faster.
But as I mentioned, you should always remain aware what happens behind the scenes. If it looks like magic, make yourself aware what happens behind the scenes by reading the code you're using.
