Question: > 
> Lisp and Fortran were the trunks of two separate evolutionary trees,
>  one rooted in math and one rooted in machine architecture. 
> 
> 
> 

I see this in *Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age*.

And someone said that Lisp are Human oriented and Fortran are Machine oriented.

Here human oriented means that the way of problem solving is more likely human do.  

And machine oriented means that the way of problem solving is more likely machine do.  

I think that Lisp and base on S-expression and symbol.
Fortran are base on von Neumann and Variables.

Is it right?

Answer: 
> 
> Why we say Lisp are Human oriented and Fortran are Machine oriented？
> 
> 
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“We” don't say that: Lisp advocates do ;-)

Both Fortran and Lisp were designed for humans. You could say that Fortran is even more human-oriented:

> 
> Don't you hate writing assembler? Where implementing a simple formula consists of confusing `add`s and `mul`s and registers? Of course you hate it, you're an engineer, not a programmer. Fortran has the solution: You can now use *expressions* like `2.0 * (X + Y)`. I can't believe it's not ~~butter~~ math!
> 
> 
> 

Whereas Lisps tend to have the extremely compiler-oriented S-Expressions for *everything*.

The point is that Fortran and Lisp approach the problem of programming languages from different directions:

* Fortran moves **away from low-level assembler** towards more human-accessible formats: a **high-level language**. This is mostly syntactic and results in greater productivity for the programmer.
* Lisp is an implementation of the *lambda calculus* with **high-level aspects** like higher-order functions, recursion and dynamic typing which it somehow tries to map **to low-level machine code**. But the brilliant design decision of Lisp was to make *everything* a list. This is less performant than Fortran's arrays, but variable-size data structures are much more flexible. Lisp [*reifies*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_%28computer_science%29) many language features like variables (via symbols) or functions and even code itself which facilitates metaprogramming.

Together this combination of Lisp features produces a different mind-set when programming. Some people claim that these features make Lisp more human-oriented (I wouldn't say that, because Lisp appears to be Lisp-oriented to me).

Note that most modern languages take from both traditions: C# takes Fortran's statements and expressions as building blocks of syntax, while Lambdas and its flavor of object orientation have a very Lispish feeling.
The human brain does neither think in lists or lambda calculus nor in mathematical formulas. Therefore neither LISP nor FORTRAN can be called human like. [Artificial neural networks](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network) try to mimic the way biological brains work. In this sense they could be called to be more human like. But as delnan points out, a neural network is not a programming language. I don't know any programming language working in a way similar to neural networks. Although languages might exist for the definition of neural networks. But such a language would define a static neural network architecture. The neural network is capable of learning and develops its own dynamic behavior over time.