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copied!<p>Its not a stupid question. Its an excellent question.</p> <p>As already answered the short answer is, "Another language." </p> <p>Well that leads to some interesting questions? What if its the very first language written for your particular piece of hardware? A very real problem for people who work on embedded devices. As already answered "a language on another computer". In fact some embedded devices will never get a compiler, their programs will always be compiled on a different computer.</p> <p>But you can push it back even further. What about the first programs ever written?</p> <p>Well the first compilers for "high level languages" would have been written in whats called "assembly language". Assembly language is a language where each instruction in the language corresponds to a single instruction to the CPU. Its very low level language and extremely verbose and very labor intensive to write in.</p> <p>But even writing assembly language requires a program called an assembler to convert the assembly language into "machine language". We go back further. The very first assemblers were written in "machine code". A program consisting entirely of binary numbers that are a direct one-to-one correspondence with the raw language of the computer itself.</p> <p>But it still doesn't end. Even a file with just raw numbers in it <em>still</em> needs translation. You still need to get those raw numbers in a file into the computer.</p> <p>Well believe it or not the early computers had a row of switches on the front of them. You flipped the switches till they represented a binary number, then you flicked another switch and that loaded that single number into the computers memory. Then you kept going flicking switched until you had loaded a minimal computer program that could read programs from disk files or punch cards. You flicked another switch and it started the program running. When I went to university in the 80's I saw computers that had that capacity but never was given the job of loading in a program with the switches.</p> <p>And even earlier than that computer programs had to be hard wired with <a href="http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/eniac.html" rel="noreferrer">plug boards</a>!</p>

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