Think of linguistics as "programming language but for languages".

Is it ones and zeros, or is it more human readable? The differences between those, on an academic level is linguistics.

There is a full wiki article that probably gives a better impression of it than I can.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_of_Noam_Chomsky

It's really weird and interesting!

There are a great many languages which are undocumented entirely or are severely lacking in documentation. One part of my job is collecting data for such languages. Another part is more traditional computational linguistics, which in my case is primarily corpus analysis (still a relatively common step in the development of model training data).