But a com puter doesn't natively understand English; it only understands m achine language. To instruct a com puter to do som ething, the instructions m ust be written in its language. However, m achine language is arcane and difficult to work with—it consists of raw bits and bytes, and it differs from architecture to architecture. To write a program in m achine language for an I ntel x86 processor, you would have to figure out the value associated with each instruction, how each instruction interacts, and m yriad low-level details. Program m ing like this is painstaking and cum bersom e, and it is certainly not intuitive.