> Spreadsheets are a great example of a declarative ethos. I kind-of agree. The primitives do have many nice properties. > You're nitpicking on details which

> Spreadsheets are a great example of a declarative ethos. I kind-of agree. The primitives do have many nice properties. > You're nitpicking on details which equally applies to prolog too. I strongly disagree. When escape hatches exist, I think you have to look at how a language/system is commonly used in order to assess whether it has some of these properties or not. Otherwise everything in which a pure function is definable becomes declarative and the phrase becomes rather useless. Prolog and spreadsheets differ in a rather fundamental, albeit empirical, way: spreadsheet users tend to make pervasive use of the these imperative features. So there are two alternatives -- spreadsheet programmers are all completely inexperienced and have no idea what's good for them, or there are fundamental limits to the declarative features of the spreadsheet model, beyond which they become imperative. I think the answer is a bit of both. Spreadsheet users tend to not be trained software engineers, but they aren't idiots and basic programming is not rocket science. None-the-less, lots of spreadsheets end up with pervasive use of imperative features (which causes real problems in terms of maintainability) So assuming a huge population of users are at least kind-of competent/intelligent, there appear to be fundamental limitations to the basic model, beyond which it can't be used to solve common problems effectively in a declarative way. Which of course should be interpreted by those who really like spreadsheet programming as a call to arms (education and/or refinements to the model) rather than a categorical criticism...