Comment by carlmr

>In my experience, declarative APIs are very powerful abstractions for specific cases where finding the path to the declared state is better left to a machine. This is seldom the case

I've been waiting for this top comment for longer than you can imagine. The declarative madness has always bothered me. Sometimes it's easier to maintain when you see the process. And harder to declare the final state. It might look neat, but maintainability beats neatness every day.