Declarative programming is not very popular because it’s hard to debug. You can’t step through it and inspect intermediate representations. It presents a black box to the developer.
That said, they do seem to show up around certain very complex APIs sometimes.
Besides SQL, CSS is the obvious one.
And I think many parts of otherwise functional/imperative APIs are pseudo-declarative.
For example, React is famously functional in its current form, with render functions and hooks being functions… but then common hooks take a dependency array which is declarative. And at the boundary of these hooks the code is no longer procedural, it disappears into the framework.
> I wish databases have better, faster, and standardized support for a fast procedural language.
That’s a fascinating idea. It would take someone with deep knowledge of a query engine to encapsulate it with a procedural API instead of a declarative one.
That’s not me, but I would love to see it.