When I think of a declarative DSL, I think of something like cloudformation or HTML. The main advantage of a declarative language is that you can describe a de

When I think of a declarative DSL, I think of something like cloudformation or HTML. The main advantage of a declarative language is that you can describe a desired end state without being overly concerned about the implementation details of arriving there. I think the sorts of dsl's that he's complaining about are more hybrid approaches and not fully declarative. I think Chef is an example of a DSL that does that right, in that if you have the right plugins and helpers you can do it fully declaratively, but it's fairly trivial to add in blocks of fully imperative code or define new blocks.