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Comment by getmeinrn | Hacker News Reader

>declarative

An admirable ideal, but declarative languages always seem to devolve towards some frankenstein imperative/declarative hybrid. We need to stop going down this path and embrace Pulumi's pattern: use existing general purpose imperative languages to generate a declarative structure. Instead, people try to take their not-mature declarative language and fit a weird general purpose language inside it.

EDIT>> I'm not suggesting that SQL needs to be declarative, only that if a problem space would benefit from declarative structures, generate them imperatively instead.

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I've silently been a big fan of this approach for years but hadn't heard about it anywhere (most likely because I'm not familiar with Pulumi).

Could you provide a reference that elaborates on "Pulumi's pattern"?

This is the closest example I could find https://www.pulumi.com/docs/concepts/how-pulumi-works/

Pulumi serves as the strongest contender to Terraform when doing IaC (infrastructure as code). Terraform attempts to be a declarative markup language (HCL) but it has a lot of weird imperative quirks due to (understandably) trying to support common complex use cases. In the end they have a clunky custom language that tries to do what general programming languages have done well forever. Pulumi doesn't re-invent the wheel, and lets programming languages do what they do best. Pulumi only really cares that the programming language generates a declarative spec that can be used to compare with your infrastructure. It's the best of both worlds.

Thanks so much!

> Pulumi only really cares that the programming language generates a declarative spec that can be used to compare with your infrastructure. It's the best of both worlds.

Fully agree! I've called this approach "imperatively generating declarations".

Things might get complicated, though, if you try to nest this approach. E.g. if you imperatively generate the structure of your deployment pipeline, which in turn, contains imperative code to generate your infrastructure spec. :) Or something like that[0].

But that's probably just the nature of the problem.

[0]: I can't come up with a fully realistic scenario right now because it's late. Maybe tomorrow!

PRQL seems the most realistic evolution out of SQL. Changing the programming paradigm will never convince the SQL true believers.

I don't really know what you're saying, can you say it another way? "Most realistic evolution"... why is that needed? If the problem is different database engines implementing the SQL spec differently, that's not something that can be papered over with another abstraction without a lot of wrinkles.

SQL does not need to be replaced, in the same way that COBOl never needed to be replaced. It can get the job done, but we have superior tools today. Better abstractions enable more productivity.

That there are N flavors of SQL is annoying, but there are foundational design choices in the language which we are stuck with today. PRQL is quite readable to those with SQL experience and feels like a plausible next language in the space without reinventing paradigms.

To go back to my original post, my main beef is with turning an imperative language into a declarative one. If you've seen enough of these types of languages degrade, you start to see a pattern.

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