Ask HN: CoffeeScript for SQL?

Most of us spend a decent part of our days writing relational database queries in a language that was designed in the 1970s. While the actual clauses of the query are very expressive, I could think of a lot of ways to clean it up.

One of my biggest pain points is that a CTE can't be used for more than one select statement. Basically a temporary view. Why can't I do:

    var @users = ( 
		select * 
		from dbo.Users 
		where isActive = 1 
	);
	
	select *
	from @users;
	
	select *
	from Projects p
	where exists ( 
		select * 
		from @users 
		where userId = p.userId 
	);
	

Or hell, even:

create view #Users as select * from dbo.Users where isActive = 1;

The compilation would be a trivial substition of the initial variable as subqueries:

select * from ( select * from dbo.Users where isActive = 1 ) x;

select * from Projects p where exists ( select * from ( select * from dbo.Users where isActive = 1 ) x where userId = p.userId );

I know that there are some very good ORMs that can sometimes be a solution. But sometimes you need SQL.

Why hasn't anyone developed a higher level language that compiles down? We've done it with LESS, SASS, CoffeeScript, haml.