Language-oriented programming (LOP) is a software-development paradigm where "language" is a software building block with the same status as objects, modules and components, and rather than solving problems in general-purpose programming languages, the programmer creates one or more domain-specific languages (DSLs) for the problem first, and solves the problem in those languages. Language-oriented programming was first described in detail in Martin Ward's 1994 paper Language Oriented Programming.