Domainspecific highproductivity environments are playing an increasingly important role in scientific computing due to the increased levels of abstraction and automation they provide. In this talk we introduce Devito, an opensource domainspecific framework for solving partial differential equations from symbolic problem definitions by the finite difference method. We highlight the generation and automated execution of highly optimized stencil code from only a few lines of highlevel symbolic Python for a set of operators used in seismic inversion problems, before exploring the use of Devito for a range of scientific equations.