Comment by halfcat

> So why do people still design declarative languages?

Cost.

If money were no object, you would only hire people who can troubleshoot the entire stack, from React and SQL all the way down to machine code and using an oscilloscope to test network and power cabling.

Or put another way, it would be nice for the employer if your data analyst who knows SQL also knew C and how to compile Postgres from scratch, so they could fully debug why their query doesn’t do what they expect. But that’s a more expensive luxury.

Good software has declarative and imperative parts. It’s an eternal tradeoff whether you want the convenience of those parts being in the same codebase, which makes it easier to troubleshoot more of the stack, but that leads to hacks that break the separation. So sometimes you want a firm boundary, so people don’t do workarounds, and because then you can hire cheaper people who only need to know SQL or React or CSS or whatever, instead of all of them.