Task-oriented programming (top) is a declarative programming paradigm where the main building blocks are tasks. Tasks represent work and have an observable task value. Tasks are combined to form compositions of tasks. From this specification of work, a ready-for-work application can be derived automatically.

Software that models how people work is omnipresent in today's society. Current languages and frameworks often focus on usability by non-programmers, sacrificing flexibility and high level abstraction. Task-oriented programming (TOP) is a programming paradigm that aims to provide the desired level of abstraction while still being expressive enough to describe real world collaboration. It prescribes a declarative programming style to specify multi-user workflows. Workflows can be higher-order. They communicate through typed values on a local and global level. Such specifications can be turned into interactive applications for different platforms, supporting collaboration during execution. TOP has been around for more than a decade, in the forms of iTasks and mTasks, which are tailored for real-world usability. So far, it has not been given a formalisation which is suitable for formal reasoning.