Notes from Jenkov.com : http://tutorials.jenkov.com/angularjs/critique.html about AngularJS Declarative vs Imperative. Couldn’t say this better…the art is to find right balance. Neither XAML , nor AngularJS found it yet (too declarative):

Quoted from the source:

Using declarative HTML templates with a bit of data binding injected is not a new idea. It has been tried before in JSP (JavaServer Pages). Here is an example:

<span><%=myObject.getMyProperty()%></span>

In AngularJS it would look like this:

<span>{{myObject.getMyProperty()}}</span>

The Declarative / Imperative Paradigm Mismatch

Declarative languages (such as HTML and XML) are good a modeling state such as documents, or the overall composition of a GUI. Imperative languages (such as JavaScript, Java, C etc.) are good a modeling operations. The syntaxes of both declarative and imperative languages were designed to support their specific purposes. Therefore, when you try to use a declarative language to mimic imperative mechanisms it may work for simple cases, but as the cases get more advanced the code tend to become clumsy

The same is true the other way around. Using an imperative language will often also get clumsy. Anyone who has tried writing an HTML document using JavaScript’s document.write() function, or wired up a Java Swing GUI using Java, or an SWT GUI for that matter, knows how clumsy this code can get.

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It is easy to think that the declarative / imperative mismatch can be avoided with a programming language that is designed to handle both paradigms. But the problem goes deeper than the language syntax.

It is not the syntax of a programming language that decides if the language is declarative or imperative. It is the semantic meaning of what the language describes that decides between declarative and imperative. You could invent a more Java-like syntax to describe HTML elements. Or a more HTML-like syntax to describe Java instructions. But such syntaxes would not change the fact that one language describes state (HTML documents) and the other language describe commands (operations). Thus, a Java-like syntax for describing HTML documents would still be declarative, and a more HTML-like syntax for describing Java-operations would still be imperative.

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