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”
Two choices always seem to end up as the fate of any large scale, long-term developed database application. Either you use an ORM, or you build your own piece by piece. I know which one makes more sense to me.
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Same goes for any application that are proud to use “no framework”. It just means that you partially implemented your own poorly documented half-assed framework.