[j-kidd]

I like your comparison of SQL to JavaScript. However, personally I love SQL and always use an ORM. My vow is to never have a line of SQL in my application source code. This is perfectly doable with SQLAlchemy, though not with crappy ORM such as ActiveRecord.

Indeed, I blame ActiveRecord for making NoSQL popular. When your ORM doesn't create foreign key for you, it is a slippery slope to blatant denormalization and eventually NoSQL.

EDIT: The other party to blame would be MySQL with its painfully slow "must-make-a-copy-of-everything" ALTER TABLE.