Okay, we've all had this experience. You find a really spiffy program on the Net and download the file xpilot-4.2.1.tar.gz , which contains it. Your problem is that you've downloaded a source release rather than a binary release. Now, if you're lucky, somewhere on the Net you may find an RPM or DEB package that contains this program. A computer program is a listing of instructions that tell a computer how to perform some specific task.
Machine languages are highly specific to a given type of machine.
For example, the machine language for the Intel chip in an IBM-compatible PC is very different from that of the Motorola processor in an Apple Macintosh. That's why IBM programs won't run on a Mac, and vice versa. Well, when computers were first invented over 50 years ago, programmers did write machine language.