[stevenameyer]

Hardware has functionality in and of itself, for example a flop-flop is a circuit that can store a voltage (ie. a one for an arbitrary voltage or a zero for a different arbitrary voltage), an adder is a circuit which adds to sets of values etc.

In a computer there are a bunch of these different low level circuitry components which when combined in different ways can be used to produce any functionality. There is a certain amount of the circuitry which is unusable by the programmer which is reserved to know where all of these components are and how to connect one component to another. You can think of this as a program that is built into the hardware which knows how to install and run other programs.

Basically when you write code, there is a program or multiple programs which transforms the words you write into a string of binary numbers which tells the control circuitry how to arrange the free components to get the desired behavior.