[everforward]

Declarative stuff gets converted to imperative at execution time. A significant difference is that a declarative system is not dependent on a particular state.

Telling a site to get you from X to Y is declarative, because X can be anything and it works. The printed out instructions are imperative, and only work for a fixed X or somewhere already on the path.

Maps is more declarative because it continually generates imperative instructions to get to Y regardless of where you currently are.

[taeric]

Right, but the point is that when you are in the execution, you are back in the imperative. And with google maps, you are almost always in the execution side. Is why I said that would be a better example for dynamic plans being better than static ones.

I'd go further and say that not just dynamic and static, but interactive versus non-interactive is the showcase there. Declarative/imperative is just not that applicable to that scenario.

And again, I do like the rest of the article and the idea that is getting explored. I just question if that is really a great example for declarative/imperative. You have to squint to make it work, for whichever version you want to support.