[qooleot]

"You still need to supply the local variables to your ORM"

That can be done automatically in many languages. At least in the sense you can do:

"where value=$(bar)"

and not:

"where value = ?", bar

OpenACS was an old web framework for the Tcl language, but it even had that 20 years ago!. The company backing it failed in the .com era, and the lack of types was a turnoff for many - but it made SQL much much more readable. And of course the queries were turned into prepared statements. A query looked like this:

select foo from table where age>:min_age and name != :user_name

Things like this can also be done in node.js (disclaimer: I wrote the blog post below):

http://ivc.com/blog/better-sql-strings-in-node-js/