system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Didn't the person who wrote world's first compiler have to, well, compile it somehow?Did he compile it at all, and if he did, how did he do that?
gpt
Early on in the history of computing, programs would be written as a sequence of operations in assembly language, which basically means they would be written in terms of actual physical operations for the computer architecture to perform, e.g. copy this numeric value to that memory location.

That's obviously very time consuming and difficult, and it means that programs have to be rewritten for each new type of processor that you run them on. So to make it easier, higher level languages that are more human readable were created, with commands that basically work as shortcuts for all the repetitive number-juggling required in assembly language. So you have to write a compiler in assembly language, which doesn't require compiling. 

It's interesting that you ask "did **he** compile it at all", since the first person to write a compiler was actually a woman, Grace Hopper :)