The Turing Tarpit: Anything language powerful enough to express programs in is in fact a programming language, and the flip side, any problem complicated enough to irreducibly require a programming language to solve is intrinsically complicated. It's all fine and dandy for the first 20%, but then it starts exploding in your face.
It turns out we have general-purpose libraries for dealing with data already. We call them "programming languages". If there is some way to simplify the problem in the general case in such a way that data manipulation no longer requires a full programming language, nobody's really proved it. If your do create an "ORM" or some other mapper that is somehow simpler than using a full conventional language, than ipso facto your mapper or whatever is too simple to handle the full complexity of the problem.
I'm not 100% convinced this nut is completely impossible to crack, but I am sure it would take accommodations on both the data and the programming side (much of the pain of this process is self-inflicted with bad paradigms and bad programming, but probably not 100%), and it sure as heck isn't as easy as it looks when you just look at it. One of the ideas in my head is to take a crack at this problem myself, but I've been telling that one to shut the hell up and go back to hiding in the corner.
It turns out we have general-purpose libraries for dealing with data already. We call them "programming languages". If there is some way to simplify the problem in the general case in such a way that data manipulation no longer requires a full programming language, nobody's really proved it. If your do create an "ORM" or some other mapper that is somehow simpler than using a full conventional language, than ipso facto your mapper or whatever is too simple to handle the full complexity of the problem.
I'm not 100% convinced this nut is completely impossible to crack, but I am sure it would take accommodations on both the data and the programming side (much of the pain of this process is self-inflicted with bad paradigms and bad programming, but probably not 100%), and it sure as heck isn't as easy as it looks when you just look at it. One of the ideas in my head is to take a crack at this problem myself, but I've been telling that one to shut the hell up and go back to hiding in the corner.