[jerf]

"All code is also imperative, eventually, at the machine code level."

This is essentially what I think, and I've thought for a long time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3507281

To the extent that people say "But what about..." my answer is that there isn't a particularly useful line to draw between imperative and declarative. There is one; I can draw it too. I challenge its usefulness. Imperative things have too many declarative things mixed in, and vice versa, in practice for it to be a very useful metric. I find what I mentioned in that post about the ease of debugging to be the real information I get when someone uses the "declarative" phrase; I can pretty much count on things breaking and me being unable to fix things whenever I see that word used.

I find it much more useful to mix things up as appropriate and not sweat which things they happen to be. A "declarative style" is a useful tool to be used, little more, and it almost never belongs in any sort of pro or con list. The pros or the cons should be at the next level down, like, "it's hard to debug" or "I'm typing way too much for what I'm trying to accomplish". I haven't evaluated any techs and given or subtracted points merely for being or not being "declarative" in a long time.