In the context of computers, being high-level means far from direct. High-level code greatly differs from machine code because it is simplified and sometimes interpreted. Examples of high-level languages are Perl and Visual Basic. C is technically high-level, in that it is not pure machine code, but is much more low-level than what most people consider "high-level".

People who aren't too familiar with computers may confuse the term to mean that high-level programming is hard, but "high-level" is from a machine code point of view, so high-level coding is much easier.