There are two ways you, a non-ancient-Greek speaker, could follow its directions. Imagine you have a hummus recipe that you want to make, but it's written in ancient Greek. Instead, a different program, aka the interpreter, reads and executes the code. In an interpreted language, the source code is not directly translated by the target machine. In a compiled language, the target machine directly translates the program. Compilers and interpreters take human-readable code and convert it to computer-readable machine code. Every program is a set of instructions, whether it’s to add two numbers or send a request over the internet.
