> ORMs are a tool, that's it. The relational operations of SQL and the object-oriented (or functional) logic of your application code are usually very different and it's nice to have a mapper that lets you interact with your app's language while it takes cares of automatically mapping it to SQL.

Functional and relational models work really well together.

At Standard Chartered we even went so far as to add relations as a datatype to our Haskell-like language. It's a charm; and comparable for me to my experience first going from C-style arrays only to eg Python's dicts.

Only that this time the dict-style data organization was the `before'. Dicts are essentially equivalent to hierarchical databases, a model whose flaws relational databases were invented to address.