Can you explain more fully, please?
I agree with the original poster -- it's important to slow down and think about the problem. Then again, I'm a big fan of trying hard not to write code you already understand too well -- that means that you're repeating yourself :-)
Prolog is far from perfect (its default search mechanism gets stuck in left-recursive clauses), but it's a start, and computers have gotten considerably faster since the 70s...
AFAIK, the best known success of declarative programming is writing a pattern matching specification (with ML, Prolog, Erlang, Haskell, or various Lisp macros) and compiling it to the necessary nested if / switch statements, rather than generating it by hand. I guess it overlaps with parser generators, and some other DSLs, too.