The term programming domain is mostly used when referring to domain-specific programming languages. It refers to a set of programming languages or programming environments that were written specifically for a particular domain, where domain means a broad subject for end users such as accounting or finance, or a category of program usage such as artificial intelligence or email. Languages and systems within a single programming domain would have functions common to the domain and may omit functions that are irrelevant to a domain.

Some examples of programming domains are:

• Expert systems, computer systems that emulate the decision-making ability of a human expert and are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning through bodies of knowledge.
• Natural-language processing, handling interactions between computers and human (natural) languages such as speech recognition, natural-language understanding, and natural-language generation.
• Computer vision, dealing with how computers can understand and automate tasks that the human visual system can do and extracting data from the real world.

Other programming domains would include:

• Application scripting
• Array programming
• Artificial-intelligence reasoning
• Cloud computing
• Computational statistics
• Contact Management Software
• E-commerce
• Financial time-series analysis
• General-purpose applications
• Image processing
• Internet
• Numerical mathematics
• Programming education
• Relational database querying
• Software prototyping
• Symbolic mathematics
• Systems design and implementation
• Text processing
• Theorem proving
• Video game programming and development
• Video processing