The very first “programming languages” were literal instructions for the computer, in a binary format. This is nearly unusable for humans, so it got very soon replaced by human-readable instructions that translated 1-to-1 to these binary instructions. Stuff like:
1 Load the value at 0x1234 into 0x5678
2 Increment the value at 0x5678 by one
3 Do an AND-Operation with the value at 0x5678 and the value at 0x1234
4 Jump to instruction 2
These Instructions can be transformed into binary code with basically a look-up-table, and the binary code is then used by the computer
Every programming language since is abstracting from that directly interpretable code, and can be translated into it.
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