What is a programming language?

What is a programming language?
We can compile (translate) one language into another
The compiler/translator is written in a language
you can make two languages communicate between each other
you can express thoughts and ideas directly
you can express emotions and feeling indirectly

What do you consider the act of programming?
Is it just writing code or can it be used to describe certain types of real world actions, for example conspiring to build circumstances.

the intricasy baffles me and the terms are so unclear.
What are your opinions?

Well, for me, there isn't that much to understand.  As far as I know, computer languages are either compiled or interpreted.  Compiled languages might be crapped out as another language (for example, assembly) but eventually it comes down to machine code and the processor (or many) does the work.

Interpreted languages are parsed and then executed by an interpreter.  An interpreter, I think, is just a particulat program that produces optimized instructions to the processor at run time (assuming the code to be interpreted is syntactically correct and debugged> But I don't have much experience in interpreted languages so things may have changed.

What do you consider the act of programming?
An approach to problem solving.