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”
Couldn’t agree more. ORM helps in some places and is extremely easy to skip if needed. I think most comments saying that ORM is an overkill are just from people fighting everything that’s new just because it’s new. Not that ORM is that new, some people are just still stuck in the 90s.