Abstract Data-driven approaches are becoming dominant problem-solving techniques in many areas of research and industry. Unfortunately, current technologies do not make such techniques easy to use for application experts who are not fluent in machine learning nor for machine learning experts who aim at testing ideas on real-world data and need to evaluate those as a part of an end-to-end system. We review key efforts made by various AI communities to provide languages for highlevel abstractions over learning and reasoning techniques needed for designing complex AI systems. We classify the existing frameworks based on the type of techniques as well as the data and knowledge representations they use, provide a comparative study of the way they address the challenges of programming real-world applications, and highlight some shortcomings and future directions.