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？
> 
> 
> 

“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.
I think first-class functions are the reason people say that and I would argue that we do in fact think in terms of lamdas/first-class funcs.

Question: "What are you going to do with it?" 

How do you answer that question/solve that problem without passing a function to your answer method?

I believe the chief reason LISP and LISP-like languages have been popular for solving AI problems is primarily the noun-like verbs.