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”
I’m starting to think more that I shouldn’t call my library, Numph.js, an ORM. It technically is one, but it’s very different than other ORMs. A lot of the stuff he’s talking about here doesn’t apply to Nymph (for better or for worse). I just don’t know what to call it though.