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Let's take a break from the web, and look at something a bit more "basic." The web has only been around since the 90s, but we've been using telling computers what to do since the 50s, computers much more simple than the ones we use today.
Why did people make compilers? You'd probably know the answer if you ever tried to play the game Shenzhen I/O. If you're writing instructions for the CPU (all code is eventually translated into this — these instructions are also known as assembly) the program is in a computer language. You're putting things in register and poking around, "jumping", checking flags. When you write code in assembly, you can have trouble understanding the code you wrote just seconds after writing it.
Humans find it easier to use different abstractions when thinking about computing, ideas like functions, variables and loops. The machine code doesn’t have those concepts. Back in the 50s, people would first write algorithms with pencil and paper in a kind of pseudo-code. After figuring out the algorithm in psuedo-code, they hand translated their pseudo-code algorithm into machine code. Later they realized, if they formalized the pseudo-code into an extremely precise specification, they could actually make a computer program do the translation from "pseudo-code" into machine code.
These translator programs are called compilers.
💡 A compilation is usually a transformation from a source representation to a target representation. -Wikipedia
When you're talking about a C compiler, it usually compiles C code into machine code (like this). The Rust and Go compilers also compile into machine code.
However, many compilers convert from one higher-level language into another higher-level language. CoffeeScript is a Ruby-like language that compiles to JavaScript. And in the case of webpack (used heavily in JavaScript programming for frameworks like React, Vue.js and TypeScript), JavaScript code is compiled into different JavaScript code. And so on...
Watch A Compiler From Scratch. DAS codecasts are highly rehearsed and move very fast. So if you feel the urge to rewind, I think that's totally normal.
That's it, no other assignment. Just watch the video and enjoy, the final result is quite nice.