Orwell (programming language) Orwell (programming language) Orwell is a small, lazy-evaluation functional programming language implemented principally by Martin Raskovsky and first released in 1984 by Philip Wadler during his time as a Research Fellow in the Programming Research Group, part of the Oxford University Computing Laboratory. Developed as a free alternative to "Miranda", it was a forerunner of "Haskell" and was one of the first programming languages to support list comprehensions and pattern matching. The name is a tribute to George Orwell's novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four", the year in which the programming language was released. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, most of
George Orwell on how "to some extent Orwell facilitated the kinds of uses and abuses by the Right that his name has been put to. In other ways there has been the politics of selective quotation." Rodden refers to the essay "Why I Write", in which Orwell refers to the Spanish Civil War as being his "watershed political experience", saying: "The Spanish War and other events in 1936–37, turned the scale. Thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and "for" Democratic Socialism as I