No, I agree with you. There are some great declarative interfaces and there are many problems best solved by one. SQL is a great example. But it’s also an exam

No, I agree with you. There are some great declarative interfaces and there are many problems best solved by one. SQL is a great example. But it’s also an example of how difficult it is to make a great declarative API. Look how much effort went into designing and then refining and then adapting SQL to changing needs. It’s been an enormous effort across a huge community. Same with CSS. Those aren’t things some developer just wrote and they got refined in an application over time. There are entire conferences about the regular redefinition of those interfaces. My point is that concept doesn’t scale to some large number of abstractions. SQL and CSS are big manifolds that operate on the boundary of your application, and often separate you from an entire other group of developers working to maintain the other side of that contract. If you try to apply that same setup to every problem, with thousands of declarative manifolds all intersecting within your application, you get chaos. Which is what many modern frameworks try to do. Declarative APIs only work when they are rare and standard and everyone knows them.