Programming language
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Years ago, the only way to tell a computer what to do was directly: you had to give it exactly the instructions it understood. That meant no if statements, no functions and not even proper variables. In other words, you had to program in machine code.
This was an issue, as writing machine code takes a long time, so is expensive.
Inventing the programming language
Ultimately, all programming languages were invented to provide high-level abstractions to make programming easier.
Many programming languages were created to try to make the lives of developers easier, but the one that has been commonly used for the longest time is C.
Assembly
Assembly is essentially one step more high-level than machine-code (the lowest-level way of programming).
It takes the instructions of machine code and gives them more user-friendly names, such as jmp, mov, etc. That's easier than typing out hexadecimal codes.