I was trying to figure out what you meant by "declarative" because CSS is declarative. (My understanding is: "declarative means you say (declare) what you want, but not how to get it." Usually SQL is the poster child of declarative languages.)
I think you're really talking about a mix of preferring data (vs actions/calculations) and DSLs (which aren't necessarily declarative)
Eric Normand has some thoughts you might appreciate:
- How a problem might take 1000 SLOC to solve directly, but only 10 SLOC with a DSL (plus up to 500 SLOC for the DSL itself; still fewer lines total) https://ericnormand.me/podcast/magical-leverage-languages
- Data vs calculations vs actions: https://ericnormand.me/podcast/what-is-an-action
---
I think data can be very powerful. For example, someone explained to me:
> I've been helping my non-tech father with Home Assistant. I've honestly been shocked with how far "community extensions" + "user configuration" can take you. Every time we hit a bug, I go "time to hit github" but without fail chatgpt and him are able to tweak a setting to get it working.
If you make your system configurable (config==data), you can skip the whole compile/build step!