Natural Language Processing Question

Hello, I am learning about natural language processing now. Technically, is this a way for a computer to input language of a person and then convert it into machine code (0s and 1s)? Or, is this a way to turn human language into some computer language like Python, and then turn into machine code as a second step?

I am assuming that NLP has only just recently become widely used (like in Chat GPT). Was it a huge jump to go from a machine understanding a computer programming language like Python to a machine understanding ordinary human language? Why was it so much more difficult to train computers to understand the later?

Thanks!