[femto113]

It's much like the difference between "how" and "what". SQL select statements are my favored example of declarative: you simply "declare" what you want ("all rows from this table with these values in those columns") and it's up to an engine to actually figure out how to do that for you. In an imperative language like C you could produce the same output, but you'd be specifying how, not just what: a for loop to iterate over each row in the table, if statements to compare values, etc.

[icambron]

But each layer’s what is the layer above its how. My C code is just declaring the program I want to run. How it is run is determined by a compiler, assembler, linker, operating system, and CPU.

There’s a sort of useless sense in which everything is declarative if you are allowed to shift around what the relevant “thing to be done” is, and it seems like many people are complaining that the article does this exact thing.

[andreareina]

Sure it's a spectrum and the exact edges can be blurry. But no-one's going to argue that there isn't a qualitative difference between a sql query and the same logic written out in c

[icambron]

And I’m not arguing that. The article is dealing with those blurry edges, though, and what layer “matters” in evaluating the distinction is very much at issue. So if we’re going to compare to SQL/C, we need to bring in the relevant analogous nuances