Languages are 'high level', written in other, faster 'low level' languages (meaning, harder to use but more streamlined for a machine and faster). Like BASIC being written in hexadecimal.

Imagine you ask a friend what they did today. They begin telling you about how they breathed all day and moved muscles to put one for in front of the other, involuntarily blinked and pumped blood. That's low level detail. You would like to skip that stuff so you can talk about higher level concepts like who they hung out with and where they had lunch.

People create higher level languages to serve a purpose. BASIC was created to allow people to learn basic coding concepts quickly. But some people maybe want to process numbers more exactly or quickly at the cost of simplicity, to give the coder more control. So other languages are created.

The purpose of a language is to allow the user to work with a machine in a consistent way. Some languages are more successful than others, and better executed than others (check out the criticisms of PHP). But the creators of languages simply want to be able to work with a computer in the way that is intuitive for them.