system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How did the first computer coding get "written" if there wasn't a "language" to write it in beforehand?

I have a basic understanding of coding but I can't understand how the first languages were written without using a preexisting language.
gpt
Computers cannot understand programming languages directly. They have to be "compiled" or "interpreted" into the native language of the computer. This "native language" is simply an arrangement of 1 and 0 bits that tell the computer what to do.

For humans, reading a long string of 1's and 0's is tedious and error prone, so we developed a 1-to-1 translation of these mappings to instruction mnemonics. That is, you would write something like

    mov al, 0x00

and that tells the computer to move the hexadecimal value 0x00 into the 8-bit register AL. Since all these instructions can be mapped directly onto a bit pattern, it was simply a matter of translating these to the appropriate pattern and loading it into memory to run.