All modern computer code has basically the same purpose: it allows us to write instructions that are intelligible to us humans, but in such a way that our intentions are legible to the machines, which means those intentions can be cleanly translated into binary—the long sequences of 1s and 0s that are these contraptions’ native tongue.

Assembly languages are very low-level and close to that binary in the sense that what the human writes doesn’t require too much translation to be converted.

Other languages, like Python, C++, or Java are higher-level and thus further from binary, but they’re also easier for humans to read and work with.

In this context, ‘higher-level’ basically means ‘more layers of abstraction.’ You start at the foundation (with binary) then go up a level, to something like assembly. Then you go up and up and up, adding more abstraction, hiding more of the computer-optimized complexity and replacing it with human-optimized intelligibility.

More abstraction generally means more people can create and wield digital tools, because you no longer need a doctorate in order to write “Hello, World!” on a computer.

As you move further up to more abstracted languages, then, you make these tools more accessible to more people, and allow more humans to use digital leverage in more intuitive ways.

As a trade-off, though, you lose some of the technical details and peculiarities that folks working in assembly or binary might notice and be capable of fiddling with at an extremely granular level. Your options become in some ways more limited and finite, even as your other capabilities grow.

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