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 until he had seen the situation "in situ", Orwell instead used his Independent Labour Party contacts to get a letter of introduction to John McNair in Barcelona. Orwell set out for Spain on about 23 December 1936, dining with Henry Miller in Paris on the way. The American writer told Orwell that going to fight in the Civil War out of some sense of obligation or guilt was "sheer stupidity" and that the Englishman's ideas "about combating Fascism, defending democracy, etc., etc., were all baloney." A few days later in Barcelona, Orwell met John McNair of the Independent Labour Party