Programming is expressing programmer intent to the greatest extent possible given technological constraints. Sometimes, that's moving from machine code to assem

Programming is expressing programmer intent to the greatest extent possible given technological constraints. Sometimes, that's moving from machine code to assembly language[1]; sometimes, that's building a declarative language to express some specific logic. Finding new ways to preserve programmer intent in machine-checkable ways (that is, not just by adding comments) is one of the consistent goals of programming language design. [1] Yes, humans used to write machine code. By hand. Computers were for serious work, not mere clerical tasks such as translating mnemonic order codes to binary and doing address arithmetic.