In computer science, declarative programming is a programming paradigm that expresses the logic of a computation without describing its control flow. Many languages applying this style attempt to minimize or eliminate side effects by describing what the program should accomplish, rather than describing how to go about accomplishing it (the how is left up to the language's implementation). This is in contrast with imperative programming, in which algorithms are implemented in terms of explicit steps.
Declarative programming often considers programs as theories of a formal logic, and computations as deductions in that logic space. Declarative programming has become of particular interest recently, as it may greatly simplify writing parallel programs.
Common declarative languages include those of database query languages (e.g., SQL, XQuery), regular expressions, logic programming, and functional programming.
Read more about Declarative Programming: Definition, Subparadigms
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