I agree that not being fully declarative is okay. But lots of pure functions are written in languages like Python and C#. “Fully-imperative, zero-declarative” seems like a bit of an exaggeration?
(I’m generally of the opinion that both laziness and backtracking are bad defaults for general-purpose programming, but they’re handy when you need them.)
See sibling comment to dragonwriter- maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, but I think it's only a bit. It's been a while since I've programmed a lot in anything but Prolog so maybe I should be a little more circumspect.
(I’m generally of the opinion that both laziness and backtracking are bad defaults for general-purpose programming, but they’re handy when you need them.)