[rgovostes]

As a university student discovering constraint solvers like Z3, I believed that the future of computing was declarative programming, with black box solvers that would obviate the need for specialized algorithms.

Dealing with Webpack cured me of the idea that declarative is strictly superior. Configuring it is just endlessly consulting the documentation, and then the underlying code, and then cargo culting StackOverflow answers to coerce the black box to create the output I want.

[thenipper]

There is a ton of interesting work being done with solvers adjacent to machine learning. I just finished a job where I was working with an operations research team solving inventory placement and transportation