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Comment by zarzavat | Hacker News Reader

JavaScript is the final layout system. No declarative language can ever handle every use case. Fortunately I rarely need to resort to JS since grid came out.

I’m not sure a constraint based system would do much good as it would sit awkwardly in the middle of grid and JS.

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With great power comes poor performance. I can immediately tell when a page uses JS for layouting (or replacing other browser functions like scrolling) as there is a noticable latency increase and the page lags about 200-300 ms behind when resizing the window.

> No declarative language can ever handle every use case.

Prolog would beg to differ.

And CSS https://accodeing.com/blog/2015/css3-proven-to-be-turing-com...

This research is cool, but I always feel it needs an asterisk. Requiring a click or event or some external clock feels like a cop out. I've seen a similar thing with PowerPoint.

It would be a bit like saying a language with iterations but neither first-class functions nor recursion is Turing complete as long as an external stack is provided. Or maybe it allows a stack (or recursion) but requires external intervention for function application.

Cool hacking nevertheless.

Prolog has well-defined execution order with side-effects. It's an imperative language masquerading as a declarative one.

MiniKanren, then?

So would LISP, Haskell, and Erlang.

Declarative in this context means no recursion or infinite loops. So none of these are declarative.

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