The imperative part of that code appears to be analogous to templating. The actual work done under the covers is not imperative, but is based on the difference between the result of the template execution and the current state of the system. That's what makes it declarative.
If there is more than one back and forth, you become declarative, even if you imperatively generate a "declarative" intermediate representation (not really sure what state file at a point in time could ever be imperative), you then would get back some data from the engine, then make choices about what to send off to the engine in the next request.
It's important to understand that with Pulumi, you can end up in either situation. You have to be careful to not become imperative overall is probably the better way to consider this.
https://www.pulumi.com/docs/languages-sdks/javascript/#entry...
Another way this can break down is if the user writes code to call the same APIs in the middle of a Pulumi script. I meant to try this myself to verify it works, but I would assume that Pulumi is not stopping me from doing something like this.
When someone tries to make a sophisticated argument that up is down and white is black, dismissive and shallow is the right response.
> The actual work done under the covers is not imperative
Having a declarative layer somewhere in the stack doesn't make something declarative, if that's not the layer you actually use to work on and reason about the system. See the famous "the C language is purely functional" post.
http://conal.net/blog/posts/the-c-language-is-purely-functio...
This is where the deep misunderstanding is coming from.
One of the interesting aspects of CUE is that it gives us many of the programming constructs we are used to, but remains Turing incomplete, so no general recursion or user defined functions. There is a scripting layer where you can get more real world stuff done too
The CUE language is super interesting, has a very unique take on things and comes from the same heritage as Go, containers, and Kubernetes
