High level languages were invented so you wouldn't have to mess around with patch panels and cords anymore. Think of them as levels of abstraction between the hardware and the human instructor.
I use the term "high level language" to describe one that uses a parser, an abstract syntax tree, and a code generator to to translate its constructs into "low level" machine instructions.
I deliberately made "levels" plural because we have an increasing number of abstractions between us and hardware now: networking stack, operating systems, application servers, browsers, etc.
