As already mentioned, everything was entered into the computer with punch cards. Imagine entering everything with 1's and 0's, it would be dificult, time consumeing, and error prone. Entering data with the keyboard was obviously alot easyer then useing punch cards. But a need for improvement was cause for creation of assembly language. Instead of remembering 1's and 0's, we could remember mnemomics(MOV, ADD, JMP) and this would be easyer to remember and less error prone. Well, as humans we are always looking for ways to improve. So high level languages such as C, C++, FoORTRAN, QBASIC, were created. Now the process of computer programing became less machine language and more human.

And infact, since everything must be translated into machine language, it might suprize you that compilers used by high level languages, were writen with assembly. So languages were created to make the task of programing computers easyer. Now you must remember that even though you are useing a high level language such as C, you still must turn it into machine code, to do that we compile and link. Compileing creates an object file, and linking creates the final executable.

So in a sence, we all program in machine language, but we do so indirectly.

EDIT:

Something that might interest you, the same program writen in C++ will be larger and slower then the same executable writen in pure assembly language. Thats why in some cases it is ideal to write your program in assembly rather then C or python.