Language-oriented programming

What do you call the style of programming in which the language is extended to support the program, rather than the other way round?

Paul Graham has suggested calling it bottom-up programming, on the grounds that one builds the language up toward the program, rather than translating the program down to the language. This hasn't caught on, because bottom-up order is not the point at all. Sure, programs that extend the language are often written bottom-up, especially for exploratory programming - but so are programs in other styles. And when I program by changing the language, I often do it top-down. I write the program I want to read, and then extend the language to make that pseudocode executable. (This may take several iterations until I reach the level the existing language understands.) So "bottom-up" is neither distinctive to the style nor an accurate description of it.

I call it language-oriented programming. This describes the essence of the style without misleading.

Several people have already used the term, as a little googling shows. Steve Heath has used it in roughly the same sense. M. P. Ward has used it for a related concept, programming using formally specified DSLs. A few years ago, Sergey Dmitriev also started using it for programming using DSLs. Helmut Leitner has used it to mean formalised naming conventions, but I can't see a useful idea in that. The LanguageOrientedProgramming page on the c2 wiki credits the term to M. P. Ward, but is a bit vague about the meaning, because they're trying to accomodate all of these senses.

None of these usages have caught on, so I have little concern about recycling the term. I have little expectation that my sense will catch on either, but it doesn't need to. Just as it's useful to extend a programming language to express a program, even though the extension will find no use outside that program, it's useful to extend a natural language to talk about programming, even if the extension won't be used outside a small circle. Expression, not standardisation, is what language-oriented programming is about.