A low-level language, we used to call this assembly programming, you're down at the level of, your primitives are literally moving pieces of data from one location of memory to another, through a very simple operation.
The advent of modern optimizing compilers and many fold enhancements in computing hardware performance have now eliminated the need to use an assemblylanguage in most applications and most applications are now written in higher level languages.
Fortran was one of the first widely adopted "high level" computer languages--before those, computers had to be programmed directly in assemblylanguage, a complicated and laborious process.
