> It's useless to categorize things as imperative or declarative without defining those words.

Yes because his use of the terms "imperative" and "declarative" are not the way I generally use them. When talking languages, I always thought you had imperative, functional, and declarative. Clojure is functional because of it's use of concepts like "functions are first order objects", closure, higher order functions, etc. I would never consider Clojure imperative.

EDIT: Possibly with the use of core.logic you could argue that it is "declarative" if you wanted to ;)