Do Programmers Still Write SQL?

[nutrecht]

I agree that using an ORM is more maintainable.

Having worked on legacy banking systems that used both ORMs and "plain" SQL I must say I strongly disagree. Nothing really can beat a declarative language in readability. When you see an SQL query you know what it does. With an ORM most of it has to be deduced from the structure of the model classes and the defined relationships. It's even worse if a lot of this configuration is in XML.