> This blurs the meaning of "declarative" to the point of meaningless The alternative is to draw a clear line where there is none. > One of the things which m

> This blurs the meaning of "declarative" to the point of meaningless The alternative is to draw a clear line where there is none. > One of the things which makes Dockerfiles imperative is the sequence of Dockerfile commands is significant; if you swap the order of a COPY, RUN to a RUN, COPY, the result changes significantly. By that logic you can call every Nix program “imperative”. They are sequences of strings, the order of which matters. The horror! A Docker image is a stack of layers. Every layer points to a preceding layer. It’s not a huge leap from that structure to a fairly elegant sugar of a string array, where each string is a declaration that applies to preceding layer thus describing the next one. I don’t see anything fundamentally imperative about it; it can be used in imperative ways, but anything can.