"We" do sometimes put declarative languages at the client level, whether SQL or something else like Prolog, Datalog, MDX... It's a long tradition. As for why "w

"We" do sometimes put declarative languages at the client level, whether SQL or something else like Prolog, Datalog, MDX... It's a long tradition. As for why "we" don't do it more often, many times you don't need to, or I think a lot of the barrier is a combination of lack of tooling plus lack of expressiveness in the client programming language. The alternative of "hand coding" actually has a lot of automated tooling already, too, so there's not much handwork involved at all if you don't want there to be. Feed the tool nothing but your schema, out pops a de-sql'd MVC-esque set of program files in whatever languages you care for. For some things it's nicest to work with these autogen'd artifacts over anything else as easily available. A somewhat related question that's fun to think about is why we don't put databases directly in our clients very often (especially SPAs). The ClojureScript community has been doing some good work exploring what it's like to put your client state in a client DB type of structure. There was also a compilation of SQLite to JavaScript done, I wonder how much usage that has?