The abstract concept of ORM is fine, unfortunately the particular ORMs we use suffer from pretending all objects and their relationships exist in RAM, there's a single instance of every entity and it's always up to date. An abstraction that isn't merely wrong, but falls apart in your face at every opportunity.
This problem is not unique to mapping objects to SQL databases, but mapping objects to anything remote at all, say a GraphQL or a REST API.
OOP as we presently interpret it is an inherently synchronous, reference (or handle, rather) based paradigm, that only works when all your state is local and in RAM.
This is why distributed object protocols keep failing. They'll keep failing until OOP programming reorients to use values for messages and makes references explicit, so their impact is seen and felt (and it's especially seen and felt when you reference an entity on another machine halfway around the world, in terms of lag, fragility, eventual consistency and everything).
We see hints of this with value types in Swift and .NET, unfortunately I'd say rather rudimentary so far. But it's coming. The ideal example of such a set up is Erlang. A language that Joe Armstrong has called "probably the only OOP language in the world". A statement Alan Kay agrees with (source: https://www.quora.com/What-does-Alan-Kay-think-about-Joe-Arm... ).
This problem is not unique to mapping objects to SQL databases, but mapping objects to anything remote at all, say a GraphQL or a REST API.
OOP as we presently interpret it is an inherently synchronous, reference (or handle, rather) based paradigm, that only works when all your state is local and in RAM.
This is why distributed object protocols keep failing. They'll keep failing until OOP programming reorients to use values for messages and makes references explicit, so their impact is seen and felt (and it's especially seen and felt when you reference an entity on another machine halfway around the world, in terms of lag, fragility, eventual consistency and everything).
We see hints of this with value types in Swift and .NET, unfortunately I'd say rather rudimentary so far. But it's coming. The ideal example of such a set up is Erlang. A language that Joe Armstrong has called "probably the only OOP language in the world". A statement Alan Kay agrees with (source: https://www.quora.com/What-does-Alan-Kay-think-about-Joe-Arm... ).