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.
import pulumi
from pulumi_gcp import storage
bucket = "hof-io--develop-internal"
name = "pulumi/hack/condition.txt"
cond = False
msg = "running"
cnt = 0
while not cond:
cnt += 1
key = storage.get_bucket_object_content(name=name, bucket=bucket)
print(cnt, key.content)
if key.content == "exit":
msg = "hallo!"
break
pulumi.export('msg', msg)
pulumi.export('cnt', cnt)
769 exit
770 exit
771 exit
772 exit
773 exit
774 exit
775 exit
Outputs:
cnt: 775
msg: "hallo!"
Resources:
+ 1 to create
info: There are no resources in your stack (other than the stack resource).
Do you want to perform this update? [Use arrows to move, type to filter]
yes
> no
details
Of note, all but the last exit had a newline, until I `echo -n` the file I copied up
---
ooo...
348 what?!?!
349 what?!?!
350 what?!?!
351 what?!?!
352 what?!?!
353 what?!?!
354 what?!?!
355 what?!?!
356 what?!?!
357 what?!?!
358 what?!?!
359 exit
Outputs:
cnt: 359
msg: "hallo!"
Resources:
+ 1 created
Duration: 27s
I uploaded a different file while waiting to be asked to continue, and then proceeded to get different outputs
Note, while I can get the contents of a bucket in TF, I cannot build a loop around it as I have above
https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/aws/latest...
TF might be susceptible to the same file contents manipulation between plan & apply as well, but then again, you can save a plan to a file and then run it later, so maybe not? Another experiment seems to be in order
https://www.pulumi.com/registry/packages/gcp/api-docs/storag...
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.