You have probably heard about imperative programming and declarative programming. And if you opened this article I guess you are interested in knowing what is better? Well, this article will cover all main benefits of declarative programming explaining when and why to use it.
Well, let’s start with the basics, declarative programming is a programming paradigm. They way you build the structure and elements of computer programs that expresses the logic of a computation without describing its control flow. In basic words, declarative programming is a programming paradigm in which the programmer defines what needs to be accomplished by the program without defining how it needs to be implemented. Many languages that apply this style attempt to minimize or eliminate side effects by describing what the program must accomplish in terms of the problem domain, rather than describe how to accomplish it as a sequence of the programming language primitives. It may also simplify writing parallel programs.
And declarative language is a type of programming language that describes what goal a task has, but without writing the code to accomplish the task. Declarative programming is an umbrella of better-known programming paradigms: constraint programming, hybrid languages, logic programming, modeling, domain-specific languages, just to name a few declarative languages: HTML, SQL are the most popular ones.
Declarative programming is, currently, the dominant paradigm of an extensive and diverse set of domains such as databases, templating and configuration management. Declarative languages allow for greater extensibility, agility and productivity. Let’s look at some more advantages of working with declarative programming:
Declarative programming advantages
Readability & usability
It is closer to a natural language, like spoken language and it means that it is more readable and it is easier to learn by non-programmers.
Reusability
It is easier to create code that can be used for different purposes.
Error recovery
It is easy to specify a construct that will stop at the first error instead of having to add error listeners for every possible error.
There are the 3 main advantages of declarative programming, however there are some more! Feel free to share them in the comments section below.
Guest article written by: Ekaterina Novoseltseva is a CMO at Apiumhub – software development hub, which is specialized in software architecture, web & mobile app development.