What is declarative programming?

 

I keep hearing this term tossed around in several different contexts. What is it?

Declarative programming is when you write your code in such a way that it describes what you want to do, and not how you want to do it. It is left up to the compiler to figure out the how.

Examples of declarative programming languages are SQL and Prolog.

The other answers already do a fantastic job explaining what declarative programming is, so I'm just going to provide some examples of why that might be useful.

Context Independence

Declarative Programs are context-independent. Because they only declare what the ultimate goal is, but not the intermediary steps to reach that goal, the same program can be used in different contexts. This is hard to do with imperative programs, because they often depend on the context (eg hidden state).

Take yacc as an example. It's a parser generator aka. compiler compiler, an external declarative DSL for describing the grammar of a language, so that a parser for that language can automatically be generated from the description. Because of its context independence, you can do many different things with such a grammar:

  • Generate a C parser for that grammar (the original use case for yacc )
  • Generate a C++ parser for that grammar
  • Generate a Java parser for that grammar (using Jay)
  • Generate a C# parser for that grammar (using GPPG)
  • Generate a Ruby parser for that grammar (using Racc)
  • Generate a tree visualization for that grammar (using GraphViz)
  • simply do some pretty-printing, fancy-formatting and syntax highlighting of the yacc source file itself and include it in your Reference Manual as a syntactic specification of your language

    • And many more …

    Optimization

    Because you don't prescribe the computer which steps to take and in what order, it can rearrange your program much more freely, maybe even execute some tasks in parallel. A good example is a query planner and query optimizer for a SQL database. Most SQL databases allow you to display the query that they are actually executing vs. the query that you asked them to execute. Often, those queries look nothing like each other. The query planner takes things into account that you wouldn't even have dreamed of: rotational latency of the disk platter, for example or the fact that some completely different application for a completely different user just executed a similar query and the table that you are joining with and that you worked so hard to avoid loading is already in memory anyway.

    There is an interesting trade-off here: the machine has to work harder to figure out how to do something than it would in an imperative language, but when it does figure it out, it has much more freedom and much more information for the optimization stage.

    Loosely:

    Declarative programming tends towards:-

  • Sets of declarations, or declarative statements, each of which has meaning (often in the problem domain) and may be understood independently and in isolation.

    • Imperative programming tends towards:-

  • Sequences of commands, each of which perform some action; but which may or may not have meaning in the problem domain.

    • As a result, an imperative style helps the reader to understand the mechanics of what the system is actually doing, but may give little insight into the problem that it is intended to solve. On the other hand, a declarative style helps the reader to understand the problem domain and the approach that the system takes towards the solution of the problem, but is less informative on the matter of mechanics.

    Real programs (even ones written in languages that favor the ends of the spectrum, such as ProLog or C) tend to have both styles present to various degrees at various points, to satisfy the varying complexities and communication needs of the piece. One style is not superior to the other; they just serve different purposes, and, as with many things in life, moderation is key.

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