Are programming languages ultimately procedural?

I'm studying a declarative programming language (Prolog) and in thinking about how certain things are programmed at a low level, a question came to me:

are programming languages ultimately procedural ?

I imagine that by "procedural" you mean languages whose statements refer to changes of state in one ore more objects, but these references are implicit, not explicit (they follow a fixed pattern, for instance, the state change made by the execution of a statement is delivered to the next, resembling a procedure).

You may be referring to the fact that our computers, at a low level of abstraction, are usually state machines - so to speak - so all programming languages would have to be procedural languages disguised as something else.

This has happened for technical and economical reasons, it's not a theoretical imperative. It doesn't have to be that way. Inside your head there is a computational device that isn't like that, and we've been experimenting with all kinds of different models for low level implementation of general-purpose computers for decades. It is not unlikely that, at some point, one of these alternative models becomes commercially viable.

StackExchange Computer Science Q#88998, answer score: 4