[white_devil]

Look, I'm willing to believe that SQLAlchemy is the bad-assest ORM on the planet, but I'm not convinced I'll never need to circumvent it to get something done, and I'm free to consider that a problem (along with other commenters, it seems).

As I mentioned, I'm very happy using SQLAlchemy's lower level API. It's a helpful and elegant abstraction over queries and table definitions etc, and I've never needed to circumvent it yet. I'm also convinced that the delightfully flexible/powerful Mako is hands down the best templating library for Python. You, sir, Rock. But you come off as needlessly argumentative in this thread.

[zzzeek]

sorry, I did a whole talk inspired by the term "leaky abstraction" and thought it was relevant.

[white_devil]

Is the talk's central idea that abstractions are bound to leak and we'll just have to deal with it? I did skim through the beginning of it, but then Youtube's player suddenly skipped to the end and stopped, and I moved on.

The thing is, SQLAlchemy's SQL Expression API is a suitable-level abstraction: high enough to be useful, but not high enough to guarantee leaks. I'm happily making queries with one-liners, and haven't had to circumvent it yet, but I bet I'd have run into trouble with any ORM already.