Declarative thingies are easier to parse? You can skip a lot of these steps, I guess --- or just stop at a working interpreter, which will get you as far as MRI Ruby got before RoR took off.
Oh, I see. I thought it was something like 'writing an ad-hoc parser for something convoluted will make you understand and appreciate systematic approaches to parsing better' but I guess that's just me being a terrible person.
