Dean Wampler keeps repeating this idea that ORMs have been an epic wrong turn for coders and that SQL-wrangling functional tools like Scala Play's Anorm represent a much more efficient way forward. I agree that being able to map/filter/fold over record collections is very cool, and definitely part of the solution, but it's crazy to think that going back to embedding brittle, non-type-safe, non-DRY, database-specific SQL calls into a host functional or OOP language is the best way to do this. We're using Squeryl for Scala and very happy with it - it's fully type-safe, uses very easy to define case classes for each db record type, and crucially allows all of that FP fold/map/filter goodness over the data models which are exposed.

Joyless heavyweight frameworks and flabby design patterns are definitely the problem, but Dean's survivalist-style head back to basics and raw SQL isn't going to let us build rich complex software in 2011.