[fnordsensei]

From what I've read, the exact definitions of imperative and declarative vary a lot. The most useful rule of thumb I've come across is to consider imperative to be concerned with HOW something is to be done, while declarative concerns primarily WHAT is supposed to be done.

SQL is usually classified as declarative in that you're not telling the database how to retrieve the top ten entries from a table - you're merely informing it that you are interested in those entries.

It struck me at some point that this definition must be relative to the level of abstraction you're operating at. For example, when using (go …) blocks, I'm declaring that I want the code contained within the block to be processed asynchronously, but I'm not describing how that is to be done. Perhaps a callback might be described as being "more imperative" since it contains more implementation details?

So, am I correct in thinking that this discussion would hinge on what you consider to be "concrete" and not? That something executes in sequence is hardly enough to decide whether it is to be considered declarative or imperative in nature.

[Igglyboo]

Declarative is what we'd like programming to be in the future. At the highest level we could say "Computer, make me a first person shooter set in WW2" and receive a ready to play game from that.

[dragonwriter]

"Make me a..." is clearly imperative.