system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Differences in programming between "programming languages", and "0's & 1's"

I'm (clearly!) not a computer scientist but have really wanted to understand this for ages and it dawned on me that /r/ has all these awesome Ask_______ subs, so here I am :)

I'd tried learning basic coding when I'd "gotten into" the ideology of free software/linux/etc (still use linux, no longer bother playing with nmap or my `terminal` as I now "know what I don't know", lol) and had long wondered *"who the heck is doing the 'hard work' of 0's and 1's, to feed all these programming-languages into an actual comp processor?"*, since then many years passed and I've met plenty of computing professionals but, upon just noticing something in a show that reminded me of this difference, I realized that not a single professional I've met "works with 0's & 1's" but simply do languages-on-top of these "deeper programming [languages?]" that actually turn text/alphanumeric commands into the 0's&1's the processor interprets, and also realized I don't even know what such professionals, or any languages(?) they work with in this area, are called (ie, I don't even know a keyword to google/wiki to begin to "know what i don't know" vis a vis the chasm/differences between working in syntactic languages, and working in-numbers....but expect Comp Sci redditors could ELI5 it for me if they'd be so kind!)

Thanks for anything to bolster my understanding.  I'm under no illusions of playing with computers again (beyond tweaking my HTPC media setup, lol), am actually honing my skills as a climbing arborist, but am still deeply curious so even some keywords would be appreciated so I can 'get' things, maybe even specific iconic professionals in the arena that I could read wiki's on (only thing I could think was "compilers" which gives a glut of info that I can't parse for my life, I see 'machine code' and suspect that's synonymous w/ my crude phrasing of "0's&1's" but not positive... I know it'd be simple for you guys to toss me a bone here though so hoping this is an OK question, seems in-bounds of this sub's rules despite how amateur/rudimentary the Q is to those replying to threads here :) )  Again thanks for any&all elucidation here!!
gpt
There is a difference, and it's more gradual than you might think!

The "0's and 1's" level of programming is called "machine language". They represent the physical state of the machine. That is, whether a wire going to a chip is high or low voltage. The various arrangements of semiconductors produce output which, when interpreted by a human being, are logical or mathematical operations.

One step up from this, but not too much further up, is "assembly language" (sometimes just called assembly). There is an exact correspondence between machine language and assembly language. However, assembly uses human readable mnemonics instead of plain bits. For instance, you might see "mov ax, $8000" which represents getting some memory into a place the computer can use it for another instruction.

Quick note: the assembly and machine code obviously depend on the chip set you use. There's different assembly for 8502 than x86_64 or ARM or PowerPC. Maybe you've heard of 32 bit vs 64 bit architecture; this is where that difference makes sense.

Most programmers don't want to care about architecture, so they use high level languages like C or Rust, which compile into assembly. Compilers translate the concepts into machine code, and you can also choose any architecture so you're not tied to a single hardware system.

Some languages, like Java, are compiled, but they're read by an application (the Java virtual machine, or JVM) which translates them into the underlying system machine code. Other languages, like Python or Ruby, are interpreted by an application which is written in another programming language. You can make a brand new programming language entirely in your web browser if you wanted to!

I hope that helps. Let me know if you need any clarification or if there's other questions you have.