Hmm. I usually think of "imperative" as "as opposed to declarative", and sequential ordering is one of its hallmarks in that context. And for Clojure atoms spec

Hmm. I usually think of "imperative" as "as opposed to declarative", and sequential ordering is one of its hallmarks in that context. And for Clojure atoms specifically I think of "functional" as in Okasaki's "purely functional data structures". Language is hard.