DeclarativeProgramming

ThoughtStorms Wiki

See also : LogicProgramming, RelationalProgramming

Not because these don't come apart, but because PrologLanguage is kind of the poster-child for all of them at the moment.

Also : ThingProgrammingLanguage

Quora Answer : Why do some people believe it is better to write programs in declarative programming languages rather than object-oriented programming languages?

Oct 5, 2018

The hope for declarative languages is that :

it's shorter and easier to declare constraints (what you want to have done) than to have to work out yourself how to do it and tell that to the computer.

even if some people still have to tell the computer how to do things, most people can just tell the computer what to do, and a few very clever and experienced (and expensive) experts can tell the computer, in general, how. The model here is SQL. 99% of SQL programmers just tell the computer what they want "select these things from those tables" and behind the scenes a few smart db admins / experts optimize by creating various indexes etc. Of course, one reason we had a NoSQL movement is that a lot of naive web startups forgot to hire those database experts.

fewer fundamental dependencies between the elements you add. So you can add new rules in any order and if you have half of the rules, you may have a system which is half what you want, but it's still half working, rather than completely non-compiling and non-working. Decomposing and sequencing the construction of systems can be easier in a declarative language.

The main problem with declarative programming is that it seems you can have very simple declarative language for doing very narrow tasks : eg. HTML for specifying how a web page looks is fairly simple, but only does one thing.

Or you can have powerful and general declarative language like Prolog. But then figuring out how to turn what you want done into idiomatic use of the language is even more obscure black magic than in FP languages like Haskell.

Quora Answer : Can we create VR models using a declarative language?

Oct 30, 2015

VRML was the classic attempt at this. It didn't conquer the world at the time, but I suspect it might still be used / useful. X3D seems to be a newer version.

OpenSCAD is another 3d model describing language.

If you mean a declarative language that can do more processing to construct a model from some constraints, I'm sure there are some. I did some very preliminary playing with this idea in Prolog, but didn't get very far. But I'm sure other people have.

To me it's obvious that constraint-based modelling through programming is something with a bright future ahead of it.

EDIT : See ThingProgrammingLanguage

Backlinks (1 items)