Hacker News Reader

Comment by nevir | Hacker News Reader

This argument is less about specific technologies, and more about patterns and practices.

For example: web UI started as declarative (HTML -> PHP), and then transitioned towards more imperative (jQuery, Backbone, Angular), and is now moving back towards declarative (React, Polymer)

View on HN

I don't really understand calling Perl declarative... I would consider the Perl CGI services I used to work on to be quite a bit more imperative than the Rails applications I've worked on. Similar with PHP, though I can see where peppering the imperative code into the declarative HTML could be considered more declarative.

Yeah, sorry, Perl is probably a bad example (I was really thinking of Mason, and even then it's a bad example). Pulled that from the list!

There's nothing declarative about HTML except for its extremely limited use case of rendering text.

HTML is purely declarative.

Each HTML document describes what it wants to have rendered, but does not describe how it should be rendered.

In theory, maybe. In practice, no. I've been round and round on ADA issues, and there is no clear distinction between "meaning" and "presentation". Clean separation is either a pipe dream, or too complex for most mortals to get right. I should become an ADA lawyer because I can now pop the purists' BS and win case$.

Yeah, div soup is so declarative. All I need to do is look at the HTML to understand how my app behaves...oh wait, no I need to reference a CSS class and iterate over 15 cascading rules and then I need to fetch whatever JS is referencing that div to understand how it's being rendered to the page. So declarative.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com