While it might take 3 or 4 lines of code to add two number using assembly language, this task could be accomplished with a single instruction in a high level programming languages like C++, Java or Python. High level programming languages were invented to abstract away the details of machine code and help programmers to concentrate on problem solving. It would be very hard to create something like that from scratch. The executable files for most applications contain hundreds of thousands or even millions of machine language instructions. It is rare for programmers to write programs directly in machine language or assembly. Its creator, John Backus, said “Much of my work has come from being lazy… and so when I was working on the IBM 701, writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.”

Like many developments in computation, it came from someone looking to get out of doing tedious work. The first high level language, Fortran (FORmula TRANslating system) was designed in 1954.

Writing program in machine language is