Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media, for neural programming. One of the methods includes processing a current neural network input using a core recurrent neural network to generate a neural network output; determining, from the neural network output, whether or not to end a currently invoked program and to return to a calling program from the set of programs; determining, from the neural network output, a next program to be called; determining, from the neural network output, contents of arguments to the next program to be called; receiving a representation of a current state of the environment; and generating a next neural network input from an embedding for the next program to be called and the representation of the current state of the environment.