I think that designating ORMs as "anti-patterns" is a bit strong. Perhaps my understanding of what an ORM is supposed to accomplish is different from the author's, but I think that some of the criticisms that the author levels against ORMs are a bit off.
Inadequate abstraction - I would make the argument that it doesn't make sense to expect an ORM to be able to completely abstract away from the underlying database. The reason that the documentation of the various ORMs is sprinkled with SQL concepts is that the ORM is providing a window into an SQL-based environment. I would never
Incorrect abstraction - I actually agree with this point, but this does not really seem to reflect on ORMs. This point has much more to do with the ongoing debate between the NoSQL movement and relational databases.
Death by a thousand queries - I hardly think that this is a knock against all ORMs. Different ORMs have different solutions (or a lack thereof) to this problem. I use Django a lot, and Django's built-in ORM offers a lot of "frills" that can help to protect against this (lazy loading, selective loading of columns, selected loading of related models). I know that, in the Ruby world, Datamapper seems to have some ways of dealing with this problem as well. It really isn't as simple as saying all ORMs do this therefore all ORMs are bad. The reality is more nuanced.
Ultimately, my principle problem with this piece is that it seems to conflate its argument for NoSQL and its argument against ORMs. NoSQL is wonderful, but it seems to be somewhat orthogonal to the value of ORMs.
ORMs are not perfect, and there is plenty of room for improvement; however, writing everything in SQL solely due to performance fears will usually turn out to be a case of premature optimization.
FWIW even rail's ActiveRecord has the same frills (lazy/eager loading, selective loading of columns, loading related models via join or via grouped selects). It even has modules that do this fixes automatically :)
Inadequate abstraction - I would make the argument that it doesn't make sense to expect an ORM to be able to completely abstract away from the underlying database. The reason that the documentation of the various ORMs is sprinkled with SQL concepts is that the ORM is providing a window into an SQL-based environment. I would never
Incorrect abstraction - I actually agree with this point, but this does not really seem to reflect on ORMs. This point has much more to do with the ongoing debate between the NoSQL movement and relational databases.
Death by a thousand queries - I hardly think that this is a knock against all ORMs. Different ORMs have different solutions (or a lack thereof) to this problem. I use Django a lot, and Django's built-in ORM offers a lot of "frills" that can help to protect against this (lazy loading, selective loading of columns, selected loading of related models). I know that, in the Ruby world, Datamapper seems to have some ways of dealing with this problem as well. It really isn't as simple as saying all ORMs do this therefore all ORMs are bad. The reality is more nuanced.
Ultimately, my principle problem with this piece is that it seems to conflate its argument for NoSQL and its argument against ORMs. NoSQL is wonderful, but it seems to be somewhat orthogonal to the value of ORMs.
ORMs are not perfect, and there is plenty of room for improvement; however, writing everything in SQL solely due to performance fears will usually turn out to be a case of premature optimization.