OP is not being very precise (and in a way that I don't think is helpful). There is nothing imperative in an if expression. Declarative languages can be Turing complete. Declarative languages are a subset of programming languages.
If you can mostly stick to the declarative way, it's still a benefit. No Turing-complete language completely prevents you from writing "bad" code. "You are not completely prevented from doing things that are hard to understand" is a bad argument. "You are encouraged to do things that are hard to understand" is a good one (looking at you, Perl).
> So why do people still design declarative languages?
Cost.
If money were no object, you would only hire people who can troubleshoot the entire stack, from React and SQL all the way down to machine code and using an oscilloscope to test network and power cabling.
Or put another way, it would be nice for the employer if your data analyst who knows SQL also knew C and how to compile Postgres from scratch, so they could fully debug why their query doesn’t do what they expect. But that’s a more expensive luxury.
Good software has declarative and imperative parts. It’s an eternal tradeoff whether you want the convenience of those parts being in the same codebase, which makes it easier to troubleshoot more of the stack, but that leads to hacks that break the separation. So sometimes you want a firm boundary, so people don’t do workarounds, and because then you can hire cheaper people who only need to know SQL or React or CSS or whatever, instead of all of them.
It’s the cycle of newcomers to <field> looking at the existing solutions and declaring “this shit is too complicated, why did these morons design it this way? Check out my DSL that does everything and is super simple!”
Then time passes, edge cases start cropping up and hacks are bolted on to accommodate them. Eventually everything struggles under the weight of not having loops, conditionals, etc. and those are added.
OP is not being very precise (and in a way that I don't think is helpful). There is nothing imperative in an if expression. Declarative languages can be Turing complete. Declarative languages are a subset of programming languages.
If you can mostly stick to the declarative way, it's still a benefit. No Turing-complete language completely prevents you from writing "bad" code. "You are not completely prevented from doing things that are hard to understand" is a bad argument. "You are encouraged to do things that are hard to understand" is a good one (looking at you, Perl).
Wishful thinking? Maybe they are tired of all this and want to make something good again, and so the cycle continues.
> So why do people still design declarative languages?
Cost.
If money were no object, you would only hire people who can troubleshoot the entire stack, from React and SQL all the way down to machine code and using an oscilloscope to test network and power cabling.
Or put another way, it would be nice for the employer if your data analyst who knows SQL also knew C and how to compile Postgres from scratch, so they could fully debug why their query doesn’t do what they expect. But that’s a more expensive luxury.
Good software has declarative and imperative parts. It’s an eternal tradeoff whether you want the convenience of those parts being in the same codebase, which makes it easier to troubleshoot more of the stack, but that leads to hacks that break the separation. So sometimes you want a firm boundary, so people don’t do workarounds, and because then you can hire cheaper people who only need to know SQL or React or CSS or whatever, instead of all of them.
It’s the cycle of newcomers to <field> looking at the existing solutions and declaring “this shit is too complicated, why did these morons design it this way? Check out my DSL that does everything and is super simple!”
Then time passes, edge cases start cropping up and hacks are bolted on to accommodate them. Eventually everything struggles under the weight of not having loops, conditionals, etc. and those are added.
After some time, the cycle begins anew.