Reverse engineering is the process of taking a compiled binary and attempting to recreate (or simply understand) the original way the program works. A programmer initially writes a program, usually in a high-level language such as C++ or Visual Basic (or God forbid, Delphi). Because the computer does not inherently speak these languages, the code that the programmer wrote is assembled into a more machine specific format, one to which a computer does speak. This code is called, originally enough, machine language. This code is not very human friendly, and often times requires a great deal of brain power to figure out exactly what the programmer had in mind.